Thailand and the United States of America: Beyond Hegemony?
Draft of article that appears in Bush and Asia, edited by Mark Beeson, Routledge, London 2006
Michael K. Connors
Introduction
This paper explores US-Thai relations in the context of a rapidly shifting global and regional landscape since the end of the Cold War. The days when US Cold War objectives twinned with a militarised Thai state are well over. Bereft of this unifying theme, any analysis of the Thai–US relationship immediately confronts a range of seemingly contradictory phenomena. In the last several years, for example, Thailand has been declared a major non-NATO ally at the very time that it has been coy about support for US strategy in the Middle East. The Thai government initially opposed the war in Iraq, but Thailand was the first Asian nation to send troops to Iraq as part of a ‘post conflict’ humanitarian mission. Having earlier announced that US forces would not use Thai airbases for transit to Iraq, the government cited treaty obligations to explain subsequent US access. Confronted with these inconsistencies, it is easy to see the attraction of the popular metaphoric phrase ‘bending with the wind’, which originated in the 19th Century to describe Siam’s adaptation to evolving structures of imperial power. In the current period, a more appropriate phrase might be ‘bending US hegemony’, suggesting that Thailand has not simply glided hither and thither according to prevailing winds. Rather, it has closely associated itself with the US, while obviously seeking to pursue its own elite defined ‘national’ interests.
If we understand hegemony in the manner proposed by Antonio Gramsci (1972), we are interested in the problematic of how a ruling strata is able to integrate subordinate elements into a hierarchical order on a seemingly consensual basis. Robert Cox (1987, 7) extends this problematic to the international level arguing that “the dominant state creates an order based ideologically on a broad measure of consent, functioning according to general principles that in fact ensure the continuing supremacy of the leading state or states and leading social classes but at the same time offer some measure or prospect of satisfaction to the less powerful.” Neo-Gramscian perspectives move beyond the territorial state as the articulator of hegemony, developing analyses of the role of transnational capitalist classes, and their impact on the nature of trading and investment regimes, and on the functioning of international financial institutions. For his part, Cox (1997, 60) has recognised the growing power of what he terms the ‘nebuleuse’: “a loose elite network of influentials and agencies, sharing a common set of ideas that collectively perform the [international] governance function.” These include the World Bank, the IMF, the WEF, the OECD, the ADB and so on. By virtue of the structure of the global economy and US dominance, and the presence of the world’s major TNCs there, sections of the US state are powerful within these agencies. These considerations are relevant to the status of inter-elite Thai-US relations.
In the Gramscian perspective hegemony, does not principally entail direct forms of domination under duress, nor does it indicate identical interests. The constitution of hegemony requires that over a range of crucial areas of interstate and international life (security, trade, sometimes regime form), metropolitan and peripheral elites share broad understanding of economic and security matters, and move towards similar objectives. Such understandings are mediated by the prevailing structures of economy and security, projects for change, patterns of socialization, and by the constitution of forces within territorial states and in transnational spheres. For the most part, Thai peripheral elites have contended and cooperated in an international order structured by US hegemony. While accepting US leadership over the last half century, there have been disagreements and significant divergences in particular arenas. Divergence does not necessarily entail the end of hegemony, a threshold needs to be reached where matters of substantive difference over crucial arenas outweigh matters of agreement and compliance. The Thai state has rarely strayed from a broad subaltern position vis-à-vis the US and the nebuleuse: this is despite countervailing pressures emanating from its regional environment, and apparent Thai doubts over the 2002 US National Security Strategy. The hegemonic relationship is also sustained by the partly deterritorialised nature of the nebuleuse, which allows some elements of the internationalised Thai elite to benefit by entering its ranks and assuming a hegemonic role (a Thai national and former Finance Minister currently heads the WTO). While many economic sectors remain nationally based, the rise of international and transnational elite spheres blurs the line between metropole and periphery.
The Thai relationship to US hegemony is historically fluid, with material, security and political elements of the relationship differing over time. This paper explores some of the characteristics of this fluidity. From the 1950s to the early 1970s, US-Thai state elites shared strong affinities across all three elements. Between the late 1970s and 1980s these affinities weakened, although they were sufficiently robust to survive Thailand’s drift into regionalism. In the 1990s the Thai state underwent a significant process of economic and political liberalization. This reflected the emerge of new domestic forces, and an increasingly transnational Thai-based nebuleuse. In tune with the US concerns to press for democratic enlargement in the post cold war era, the two states moved closer together. In the current period, commencing in 2001 with the arrival of the Bush and Thaksin administrations, the hegemonic relationship has taken on a new form, with security and resource imperatives compelling the US to extend its relationship with a Thai state that remains uneasy about US global strategy. Furthermore, the democratic convergence of the 1990s has receded, with Thailand moving towards authoritarian forms of rule. The hegemonic relationship has become strained. The rest of this chapter explores these different periods, with the spotlight on more recent times.
Read the full draft here http://www.latrobe.edu.au/socsci/staff/connors/connors-Thai-US.doc
Showing posts with label Foreign Policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Foreign Policy. Show all posts
September 18, 2007
September 15, 2007
Juvenelia: Australia and the United States
The Imperative Grammar: Australia and the United States
Michael Connors
During the Sydney APEC Summit in early September the Howard administration and Bush administrations inked the Defence Trade Cooperation Treaty, deepening Australia’s access to US military technology and contractual rights. The agreement underscores the intensifying nature of the US-Australia alliance. For some Australian nationalists the agreement is further evidence of Australia’s lapdog approach to foreign policy; a sign of dependence and its prolonged adolescence on the world stage.
Don Watson’s 2001 Quarterly Essay Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America captures this mood in its suggestion that Australia should petition the United States to become the 51st state of the Union; “The United States will get a state instead of a colony and Australians wouldn’t have to go on pretending our souls are our own.” Watson falls into the camp that laments, for having laid to rest the pursuit of Australia’s own ends, Australia’s endless quest for great and powerful friends.
The key instrument in Australia’s permanent infantilisation is held to be the 1951 ANZUS treaty. As New Zealand’s role in ANZUS treaty is currently redundant, the treaty effectively defines the terms of the US-Australia bilateral alliance. Until its invocation after the World Trade Centre attacks in 2001, the treaty was an umbrella under which hundreds of more concrete agreements worked, including intelligence sharing and the terms of military exercises.
Approaching the question from a different angle, assuming that Australian foreign policy elites are ruthlessly pragmatic and far-thinking, is it not possible to think of the alliance as indeed serving particular state-defined national interests? Furthermore, is it not possible to reverse the typical image of dependency and move to an image of the tail wagging the dog – at least on occasion: sometimes Australia’s aspired benefit comes at a cost to the United States.
Ambrose Bierce in his 19th century Devil’s Dictionary defined an alliance as: “In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.”
Bierce’s wit is a suggestive starting point to undo the dependency thesis and begin to unravel what interests are served through the alliance. What does Australia get from the alliance?
In its important foreign policy statement Advancing the National Interest (2003) the Howard government states:
The depth of security, economic and political ties that we have with the United States makes this a vital relationship. No other country can match the United States' global reach in international affairs…Further strengthening Australia's ability to influence and work with the United States is essential for advancing our national interests.
(Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade 2003)
And speaking in 2001 Howard claims that
The ANZUS pact between Australia and the United States has done more to deliver the security of the Australian nation in the years that have gone by since World War II than any other international arrangement.
The first quotation is unremarkable: Australia’s government seeks to align itself with the hegemonic superpower. Access to that power, by support of that power, is seen as advancing the wellbeing of Australian security. The second quotation is remarkable, indicating that the government’s skepticism of the collective security arrangements and an emerging international order based on the efforts of the United Nations goes so far as to discount anything but the US as the key to global order.
Despite the brief dalliance of the Labor years (1983-1996) with middle-power diplomacy – the idea that middle powers require the comforting structure of international rules and regulations as a safeguard against the capricious nature of an international system dominated by great powers – Australian governments have largely responded to security questions using the grammar of the US alliance, often intuitively.
Policy and intellectual communities surrounding the government are keyed into the grammar. In a 2003 Melbourne Asia Policy Paper Paul Dibbs, one time architect of Australia’s security policy, declares that any dispassionate analysis would confirm the indispensability of the alliance, which he holds to be self evident. In 2004 ANU Professor Hugh White, agonizing over the Iraq war, and thinking with the grammar of the alliance, ludicrously confirmed the unprincipled nature of alliance logic when he admitted the possibility that sometimes going to war for the sake of maintaining an alliance can be a wise decision:
…And what of the first policy judgment: that we needed to support the invasion to protect our alliance with the US? This is a respectable argument. It sometimes makes sense to go to war to support an ally if you expect them to support you when your turn comes. It would have been unwise to say no to Washington about Iraq. But we did not need to rush to say yes either.
For some leading academics of international relations, Mr Howard is a "prescient political seer, (in) position to extract substantial and enduring benefits from the ANZUS affiliation including the culmination of a wide-ranging bilateral Australia US free trade agreement."
None of these views, including those of the government, indicate servile and wretched lapdoggery in the face of a great and powerful friend. All of them indicate a rather calculated approach to the alliance, even going so far as to speak of extracting benefits that might well be seen as costly to the superior partner in the alliance.
The Australian state and its ruling elites are not victims of dependency, but beneficiaries of an alliance system that secures a global hierarchy of states and economies in which Australia sits comfortably. Australia is a partner in what has been described as a system of global apartheid, where access to the goods that deliver wellbeing are skewed heavily in favour of advanced capitalist economies.
The alliance does not tie Australia into slavish dependence: in fact Australia has significant strategic independence. That the Australian government may appear to lack this simply reflects a convergence of interest. It is arguable that the Howard Government’s 1997 foreign policy paper, In the National Interest actually anticipates the hard-nosed disavowal of the United Nations by the Bush administration.
Rather than following the US into Iraq, the Howard government saw such action as the consummation of its own security outlook, or more specifically as a means to advance that outlook. This is to suggest that the alliance is not just about poor choices or misguided policy; there are structural features of Australia’s place in the world that compel it to bandwagon with the US, and sometimes to be a step ahead.
If there is to be substantive and enduring change in foreign policy, there needs to be a fundamental and substantive change in the grammar of Australian society, economics and politics. Without such changes Australia’s alliance relationship with the United States will always be an active/reactive one within a space that takes as given the global hierarchy and Australia’s rightful place in it.
Slightly different version of the piece appears on New Matilda. (newmatilda.com) 14th
November, 2007.
Michael Connors
During the Sydney APEC Summit in early September the Howard administration and Bush administrations inked the Defence Trade Cooperation Treaty, deepening Australia’s access to US military technology and contractual rights. The agreement underscores the intensifying nature of the US-Australia alliance. For some Australian nationalists the agreement is further evidence of Australia’s lapdog approach to foreign policy; a sign of dependence and its prolonged adolescence on the world stage.
Don Watson’s 2001 Quarterly Essay Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America captures this mood in its suggestion that Australia should petition the United States to become the 51st state of the Union; “The United States will get a state instead of a colony and Australians wouldn’t have to go on pretending our souls are our own.” Watson falls into the camp that laments, for having laid to rest the pursuit of Australia’s own ends, Australia’s endless quest for great and powerful friends.
The key instrument in Australia’s permanent infantilisation is held to be the 1951 ANZUS treaty. As New Zealand’s role in ANZUS treaty is currently redundant, the treaty effectively defines the terms of the US-Australia bilateral alliance. Until its invocation after the World Trade Centre attacks in 2001, the treaty was an umbrella under which hundreds of more concrete agreements worked, including intelligence sharing and the terms of military exercises.
Approaching the question from a different angle, assuming that Australian foreign policy elites are ruthlessly pragmatic and far-thinking, is it not possible to think of the alliance as indeed serving particular state-defined national interests? Furthermore, is it not possible to reverse the typical image of dependency and move to an image of the tail wagging the dog – at least on occasion: sometimes Australia’s aspired benefit comes at a cost to the United States.
Ambrose Bierce in his 19th century Devil’s Dictionary defined an alliance as: “In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.”
Bierce’s wit is a suggestive starting point to undo the dependency thesis and begin to unravel what interests are served through the alliance. What does Australia get from the alliance?
In its important foreign policy statement Advancing the National Interest (2003) the Howard government states:
The depth of security, economic and political ties that we have with the United States makes this a vital relationship. No other country can match the United States' global reach in international affairs…Further strengthening Australia's ability to influence and work with the United States is essential for advancing our national interests.
(Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade 2003)
And speaking in 2001 Howard claims that
The ANZUS pact between Australia and the United States has done more to deliver the security of the Australian nation in the years that have gone by since World War II than any other international arrangement.
The first quotation is unremarkable: Australia’s government seeks to align itself with the hegemonic superpower. Access to that power, by support of that power, is seen as advancing the wellbeing of Australian security. The second quotation is remarkable, indicating that the government’s skepticism of the collective security arrangements and an emerging international order based on the efforts of the United Nations goes so far as to discount anything but the US as the key to global order.
Despite the brief dalliance of the Labor years (1983-1996) with middle-power diplomacy – the idea that middle powers require the comforting structure of international rules and regulations as a safeguard against the capricious nature of an international system dominated by great powers – Australian governments have largely responded to security questions using the grammar of the US alliance, often intuitively.
Policy and intellectual communities surrounding the government are keyed into the grammar. In a 2003 Melbourne Asia Policy Paper Paul Dibbs, one time architect of Australia’s security policy, declares that any dispassionate analysis would confirm the indispensability of the alliance, which he holds to be self evident. In 2004 ANU Professor Hugh White, agonizing over the Iraq war, and thinking with the grammar of the alliance, ludicrously confirmed the unprincipled nature of alliance logic when he admitted the possibility that sometimes going to war for the sake of maintaining an alliance can be a wise decision:
…And what of the first policy judgment: that we needed to support the invasion to protect our alliance with the US? This is a respectable argument. It sometimes makes sense to go to war to support an ally if you expect them to support you when your turn comes. It would have been unwise to say no to Washington about Iraq. But we did not need to rush to say yes either.
For some leading academics of international relations, Mr Howard is a "prescient political seer, (in) position to extract substantial and enduring benefits from the ANZUS affiliation including the culmination of a wide-ranging bilateral Australia US free trade agreement."
None of these views, including those of the government, indicate servile and wretched lapdoggery in the face of a great and powerful friend. All of them indicate a rather calculated approach to the alliance, even going so far as to speak of extracting benefits that might well be seen as costly to the superior partner in the alliance.
The Australian state and its ruling elites are not victims of dependency, but beneficiaries of an alliance system that secures a global hierarchy of states and economies in which Australia sits comfortably. Australia is a partner in what has been described as a system of global apartheid, where access to the goods that deliver wellbeing are skewed heavily in favour of advanced capitalist economies.
The alliance does not tie Australia into slavish dependence: in fact Australia has significant strategic independence. That the Australian government may appear to lack this simply reflects a convergence of interest. It is arguable that the Howard Government’s 1997 foreign policy paper, In the National Interest actually anticipates the hard-nosed disavowal of the United Nations by the Bush administration.
Rather than following the US into Iraq, the Howard government saw such action as the consummation of its own security outlook, or more specifically as a means to advance that outlook. This is to suggest that the alliance is not just about poor choices or misguided policy; there are structural features of Australia’s place in the world that compel it to bandwagon with the US, and sometimes to be a step ahead.
If there is to be substantive and enduring change in foreign policy, there needs to be a fundamental and substantive change in the grammar of Australian society, economics and politics. Without such changes Australia’s alliance relationship with the United States will always be an active/reactive one within a space that takes as given the global hierarchy and Australia’s rightful place in it.
Slightly different version of the piece appears on New Matilda. (newmatilda.com) 14th
November, 2007.
September 8, 2007
US objectives in the War on Terror
America used terror to mask its real aims
By Michael Connors
The Age, Melbourne
September 2, 2005
Canberra has stifled debate while hitching its cart to the US, writes Michael Connors.
HUGH White is the talking head of the Australian foreign policy commentariat. He is a professor of strategic studies at the ANU, and the security analyst of choice for many in Australia. But his comments on this page yesterday demonstrate an appalling lack of understanding of the politics of the war on terrorism in this country.
White confesses to what most of those people imbibing at diplomatic functions and academic talk-fests have known for quite some time — that the hysterical (he chooses the word heroic) public presentation of the threat of terror is at odds with the more realistic threat perceptions regarding terrorism held by those in power.
The fact is that "terrorism" is not going to wipe out whole societies in the way that nuclear conflict during the Cold War might have done.
White notes the divergence between rational discussion and sensible gradation of threat possibilities among government insiders, flanked by the growing entourage of terror experts, and the ersatz Churchillian thunder of politicians in public.
to explain this divergence? It's a good question, but White's answer fails. He writes: "Politicians (and commentators for that matter) talk about terrorism in what we might
call heroic terms because that is how we as publics want them to talk about it."
Do you get that? It's your fault. You weren't happy with the Government's anti-terror campaign, you wanted to be alarmed. You are aching for a chance to sacrifice, seeking an escape from your meaningless existence. It is you who forces onto politicians an excessive language of threat and extinction. Terror has given your life meaning and, as a consequence, politicians are hostage to popular prejudice. They can only repeat ridiculous rot about barbarians at the gate because if they don't, you won't be happy.
White hopes that if we reflect on this insight we might find a way out, be more sensible, listen to the experts more. Honesty might be a better option.
The Government has not been reluctantly serving up a feast of vacuous platitudes to satiate popular prejudice. It has willingly mastered the art of confection, recklessly serving "sexed-up" intelligence, homilies to our sacred way of life, and, at times, lies.
It has done this to ensure that Australia is hitched to the world's superpower. This is the highest priority of nation-interest diplomacy, and if joining in the "war on terror" is required, this Government will bleat with the rest of them. It'll go to war, too, on totally false premises.
The Government, not the people, is to blame for the woefully inadequate public discussion of terrorism in this country. The language of terror, the inflation of threat and the manipulation of news have been instrumental in furthering US and, by this Government's logic, Australian strategic objectives.
Using terrorism as a cover, the US has embarked on a remarkable expansion and repositioning of its global presence. Bases have sprung up in central Asia and the Middle East.
Why have we witnessed an expansive US policy if terrorism is not the global threat it is made out to be, and if policing is a better option than military deployment? The simple answer is that the US seeks to maintain its present status as sole superpower.
Since the early 1990s when Paul Wolfowitz, then a defence official, penned a memo about the need to thwart the emergence of a regional or global rival to US global hegemony, the US has been playing the game of being the only game in town.
It's no secret.
Even the US National Security Strategy of 2002 addresses the overriding imperative of US global hegemony. To achieve this goal the US needs resource security and unsurpassed military presence.
The rhetoric of the war on terrorism has cloaked these objectives. After all, it is easier to win popular support with talk of evil than with talk of hegemony, military expansion and resource security.
The debacle in Iraq, a more sceptical population, and opposition to national security legislation are all undermining the instrumental uses of the inflated threat of terror.
As Australian foreign policy elites try to pick up the pieces, cover their tracks, and disown some of their erstwhile commentary, it must be tempting to point the finger at someone.
By Michael Connors
The Age, Melbourne
September 2, 2005
Canberra has stifled debate while hitching its cart to the US, writes Michael Connors.
HUGH White is the talking head of the Australian foreign policy commentariat. He is a professor of strategic studies at the ANU, and the security analyst of choice for many in Australia. But his comments on this page yesterday demonstrate an appalling lack of understanding of the politics of the war on terrorism in this country.
White confesses to what most of those people imbibing at diplomatic functions and academic talk-fests have known for quite some time — that the hysterical (he chooses the word heroic) public presentation of the threat of terror is at odds with the more realistic threat perceptions regarding terrorism held by those in power.
The fact is that "terrorism" is not going to wipe out whole societies in the way that nuclear conflict during the Cold War might have done.
White notes the divergence between rational discussion and sensible gradation of threat possibilities among government insiders, flanked by the growing entourage of terror experts, and the ersatz Churchillian thunder of politicians in public.
to explain this divergence? It's a good question, but White's answer fails. He writes: "Politicians (and commentators for that matter) talk about terrorism in what we might
call heroic terms because that is how we as publics want them to talk about it."
Do you get that? It's your fault. You weren't happy with the Government's anti-terror campaign, you wanted to be alarmed. You are aching for a chance to sacrifice, seeking an escape from your meaningless existence. It is you who forces onto politicians an excessive language of threat and extinction. Terror has given your life meaning and, as a consequence, politicians are hostage to popular prejudice. They can only repeat ridiculous rot about barbarians at the gate because if they don't, you won't be happy.
White hopes that if we reflect on this insight we might find a way out, be more sensible, listen to the experts more. Honesty might be a better option.
The Government has not been reluctantly serving up a feast of vacuous platitudes to satiate popular prejudice. It has willingly mastered the art of confection, recklessly serving "sexed-up" intelligence, homilies to our sacred way of life, and, at times, lies.
It has done this to ensure that Australia is hitched to the world's superpower. This is the highest priority of nation-interest diplomacy, and if joining in the "war on terror" is required, this Government will bleat with the rest of them. It'll go to war, too, on totally false premises.
The Government, not the people, is to blame for the woefully inadequate public discussion of terrorism in this country. The language of terror, the inflation of threat and the manipulation of news have been instrumental in furthering US and, by this Government's logic, Australian strategic objectives.
Using terrorism as a cover, the US has embarked on a remarkable expansion and repositioning of its global presence. Bases have sprung up in central Asia and the Middle East.
Why have we witnessed an expansive US policy if terrorism is not the global threat it is made out to be, and if policing is a better option than military deployment? The simple answer is that the US seeks to maintain its present status as sole superpower.
Since the early 1990s when Paul Wolfowitz, then a defence official, penned a memo about the need to thwart the emergence of a regional or global rival to US global hegemony, the US has been playing the game of being the only game in town.
It's no secret.
Even the US National Security Strategy of 2002 addresses the overriding imperative of US global hegemony. To achieve this goal the US needs resource security and unsurpassed military presence.
The rhetoric of the war on terrorism has cloaked these objectives. After all, it is easier to win popular support with talk of evil than with talk of hegemony, military expansion and resource security.
The debacle in Iraq, a more sceptical population, and opposition to national security legislation are all undermining the instrumental uses of the inflated threat of terror.
As Australian foreign policy elites try to pick up the pieces, cover their tracks, and disown some of their erstwhile commentary, it must be tempting to point the finger at someone.
September 6, 2007
War on Error
War on ErrorBy: Michael ConnorsWednesday 31 August 2005
New Matilda
For Australian holiday makers, Thailand remains the exotic land of smiles and cheap fake brands. Congratulations must go to the Tourist Authority of Thailand, which has pulled off a PR coup by separating the tourist brand of Thailand Inc from the ongoing violence in the deep southern provinces of the country. Hundreds of deaths have occurred there since the beginning of last year. A week hardly goes by without a bombing incident or seemingly random slaying.
Is there something missing in the last paragraph? A word that would have allowed the reader to process the information into a ready-made frame? I should have used the word 'Muslim' or 'Islam', but I did not. Had I used it, a reader who knows little about Thailand would have conveniently fitted the story into the dominant narrative of the 'War on Terror'. Events in Thailand have been mistakenly reported in this manner, at a great loss to local nuance and complexity.
The Malay Muslim-majority provinces in southern Thailand - Narathiwat, Yala, Pattani and, to a lesser extent, Satun - have a long history of tense relations with the Thai Buddhist state. The southern region was once the centre of Islamic scholarship in Southeast Asia, and a Malay sultanate. Historical, cultural, political and economic grievances arising from the region's integration into the Thai nation-state early last century have been, and perhaps remain, breeding grounds for separatist or militant-religious inspired politics among a minority of the population.Political liberalisation in the 1980s opened a space for Muslim elites to enter the political sphere and by the early 1990s it was commonly believed that militant separatist groups were in terminal decline. However, since the nationalist Thaksin government came to office in Bangkok in 2001, high levels of politicised violence have returned.
Many people and organisations freely relate the events in Thailand to a global jihad, linking events there to a new network of trans-national Islamist militants. Some commentators, dependent on dubious intelligence reports and forced confessions, make Powell-esque presentations to argue that global jihad lies behind what has been dubbed in Thai as fai tai (the southern fire). Others, such as the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, cast doubt on the scale of trans-national links, and suggest that the troubles relate to a revived secessionist insurgency with its roots in Thailand's (then Siam) annexation of the territory in the early twentieth century - and the subsequent cultural, economic and political oppression experienced by the ethnic Malay Muslims under the Thai Buddhist state.
Let's take a home-grown example of how historically complex struggles are conveniently channelled into the dominant narrative of the 'War on Terror'. Sally Neighbour, an ABC journalist, last year released her book In the Shadow of Swords: on the Trail of Terrorism from Afghanistan to Australia. In one section, Neighbour examines the extending tentacles of Al Qaeda into South East Asia, including Thailand, through the case of reputed South East Asian Al Qaeda boss, Hambali. She then moves to discuss last year's late-April 'uprising' in the south of Thailand that resulted in over 100 dead, when 'insurgents' launched raids against government facilities.Neighbour declares that southern Thailand has become 'a new battleground for jihad' full of rampaging rebels with 'new military-issue weapons'. She also says that after the uprising, the police discovered a plan for a seven-stage conflict escalation, involving 30 000 'holy warriors', with the aim of establishing Islamic law. The insurgents, who Neighbour describes as having 'new-issue weapons', were mostly armed with knives, machetes and substandard weaponry. The battle with military and police was one-sided. It was clear that many of the insurgents were summarily executed.There was little effort by Neighbour to present a historical dimension to ethnic Malay– Thai state relations in Thailand. Indeed there was very little evidence of research at all on the question of Thailand.
Neighbour's discussion of a seven-point plan comes from a Sydney Morning Herald article written by Louise Williams in May 2004, for which Williams interviewed me by telephone. I informed Williams of the seven-point insurgency plan, noting that the Thai-language press had reported the plan in January 2004, perhaps earlier. I also noted that doubts exist about its authenticity or the extent to which it could explain events.Williams's subsequent report rightly notes that Thai intelligence was 'claiming' an armed insurgency was underway. She provides some details of the plan and then notes, 'violent criminal networks in the region have their own vested interests and shadowy links to the security forces, complicating attempts to define the threat.' This was an important qualification that has been missed in much international reporting on the south of Thailand.Neighbour, who cites Williams's Sydney Morning Herald article, uses the seven-point plan to paint a picture of the south of Thailand as a front in global jihad.
Neighbour is not solely responsible for the misinformation, and the inflation of the threat of international terrorism. She merely dipped into the the dominant mindset that allows, not always intentionally, prejudice and presumption to drive analysis. So what is going on in the south of Thailand? Since Thai intelligence, the military, and the government issue contradictory statements, and since no group has come forward to claim responsibility for acts of alleged Islamic terrorism, the answer is that no one quite knows - or rather, no one is telling. The south has become a playground of intelligence and counter-intelligence, making it hard to separate fact from fiction. For example, in early 2004 armed separatists allegedly launched an assault on an army camp, seizing weapons and killing four soldiers.
Within Thailand there were claims and counterclaims that military insiders had hatched the attack to cover their own arms sales to Achenese rebels. Thai Prime Minister Thaksin, as well as scholars in the south, have often attributed violence to bandits, criminal elements and corrupt elements in the state apparatus, rather than to Islamic militants. Even some Thai military figures have treated claims of insurgency with caution. Fourth Army Commander General Pisarn Wattanawongkiri, charged with security in the south, argued that separatist sympathies had been exploited by criminal elements, including those that had been pushed from the north in 2003 as a result of the government's war on drugs. He also suggested that established interests in the south were seeking to destabilise the government, presumably to protect various predatory interests (drugs, smuggling, protection rackets). Thai-language commentary on the southern crisis has named various suspects (Islamic militants, older separatist networks, political–bureaucratic–military networks, the CIA, mafia) as fanning the southern fire, but none with any certainty.
Despite the uncertainty about who is behind the various daily killings and the so-called 'insurgency', the government has repeatedly endorsed repressive measures against people in the south, including the imposition of martial law, and an executive decree providing the government with the right to hold suspects for thirty days. Numerous disappearances have been reported by Muslim families. The Thai police or other security agents, often under pressure to produce results, have been implicated in the disappearance of scores of Muslim suspects.
The Thai case is just one example of how complex situations with long histories can fall victim to the War on Terror mentality. I am not arguing that there are no elements of a militant Islamist network present in Thailand. I am arguing that if such elements are present, they form only one part of a larger picture.When journalists and commentators with little local knowledge draw on one-sided intelligence reports (show me an intelligence agency without an agenda) to reduce historical complexity to the common denominator of Islamic jihad, the myth that the world faces a global Islamist threat is enforced. Making an effort to expose poor analysis, to highlight local dynamics, and to take part in the War on Error, is a small but worthwhile enterprise.
New Matilda
For Australian holiday makers, Thailand remains the exotic land of smiles and cheap fake brands. Congratulations must go to the Tourist Authority of Thailand, which has pulled off a PR coup by separating the tourist brand of Thailand Inc from the ongoing violence in the deep southern provinces of the country. Hundreds of deaths have occurred there since the beginning of last year. A week hardly goes by without a bombing incident or seemingly random slaying.
Is there something missing in the last paragraph? A word that would have allowed the reader to process the information into a ready-made frame? I should have used the word 'Muslim' or 'Islam', but I did not. Had I used it, a reader who knows little about Thailand would have conveniently fitted the story into the dominant narrative of the 'War on Terror'. Events in Thailand have been mistakenly reported in this manner, at a great loss to local nuance and complexity.
The Malay Muslim-majority provinces in southern Thailand - Narathiwat, Yala, Pattani and, to a lesser extent, Satun - have a long history of tense relations with the Thai Buddhist state. The southern region was once the centre of Islamic scholarship in Southeast Asia, and a Malay sultanate. Historical, cultural, political and economic grievances arising from the region's integration into the Thai nation-state early last century have been, and perhaps remain, breeding grounds for separatist or militant-religious inspired politics among a minority of the population.Political liberalisation in the 1980s opened a space for Muslim elites to enter the political sphere and by the early 1990s it was commonly believed that militant separatist groups were in terminal decline. However, since the nationalist Thaksin government came to office in Bangkok in 2001, high levels of politicised violence have returned.
Many people and organisations freely relate the events in Thailand to a global jihad, linking events there to a new network of trans-national Islamist militants. Some commentators, dependent on dubious intelligence reports and forced confessions, make Powell-esque presentations to argue that global jihad lies behind what has been dubbed in Thai as fai tai (the southern fire). Others, such as the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, cast doubt on the scale of trans-national links, and suggest that the troubles relate to a revived secessionist insurgency with its roots in Thailand's (then Siam) annexation of the territory in the early twentieth century - and the subsequent cultural, economic and political oppression experienced by the ethnic Malay Muslims under the Thai Buddhist state.
Let's take a home-grown example of how historically complex struggles are conveniently channelled into the dominant narrative of the 'War on Terror'. Sally Neighbour, an ABC journalist, last year released her book In the Shadow of Swords: on the Trail of Terrorism from Afghanistan to Australia. In one section, Neighbour examines the extending tentacles of Al Qaeda into South East Asia, including Thailand, through the case of reputed South East Asian Al Qaeda boss, Hambali. She then moves to discuss last year's late-April 'uprising' in the south of Thailand that resulted in over 100 dead, when 'insurgents' launched raids against government facilities.Neighbour declares that southern Thailand has become 'a new battleground for jihad' full of rampaging rebels with 'new military-issue weapons'. She also says that after the uprising, the police discovered a plan for a seven-stage conflict escalation, involving 30 000 'holy warriors', with the aim of establishing Islamic law. The insurgents, who Neighbour describes as having 'new-issue weapons', were mostly armed with knives, machetes and substandard weaponry. The battle with military and police was one-sided. It was clear that many of the insurgents were summarily executed.There was little effort by Neighbour to present a historical dimension to ethnic Malay– Thai state relations in Thailand. Indeed there was very little evidence of research at all on the question of Thailand.
Neighbour's discussion of a seven-point plan comes from a Sydney Morning Herald article written by Louise Williams in May 2004, for which Williams interviewed me by telephone. I informed Williams of the seven-point insurgency plan, noting that the Thai-language press had reported the plan in January 2004, perhaps earlier. I also noted that doubts exist about its authenticity or the extent to which it could explain events.Williams's subsequent report rightly notes that Thai intelligence was 'claiming' an armed insurgency was underway. She provides some details of the plan and then notes, 'violent criminal networks in the region have their own vested interests and shadowy links to the security forces, complicating attempts to define the threat.' This was an important qualification that has been missed in much international reporting on the south of Thailand.Neighbour, who cites Williams's Sydney Morning Herald article, uses the seven-point plan to paint a picture of the south of Thailand as a front in global jihad.
Neighbour is not solely responsible for the misinformation, and the inflation of the threat of international terrorism. She merely dipped into the the dominant mindset that allows, not always intentionally, prejudice and presumption to drive analysis. So what is going on in the south of Thailand? Since Thai intelligence, the military, and the government issue contradictory statements, and since no group has come forward to claim responsibility for acts of alleged Islamic terrorism, the answer is that no one quite knows - or rather, no one is telling. The south has become a playground of intelligence and counter-intelligence, making it hard to separate fact from fiction. For example, in early 2004 armed separatists allegedly launched an assault on an army camp, seizing weapons and killing four soldiers.
Within Thailand there were claims and counterclaims that military insiders had hatched the attack to cover their own arms sales to Achenese rebels. Thai Prime Minister Thaksin, as well as scholars in the south, have often attributed violence to bandits, criminal elements and corrupt elements in the state apparatus, rather than to Islamic militants. Even some Thai military figures have treated claims of insurgency with caution. Fourth Army Commander General Pisarn Wattanawongkiri, charged with security in the south, argued that separatist sympathies had been exploited by criminal elements, including those that had been pushed from the north in 2003 as a result of the government's war on drugs. He also suggested that established interests in the south were seeking to destabilise the government, presumably to protect various predatory interests (drugs, smuggling, protection rackets). Thai-language commentary on the southern crisis has named various suspects (Islamic militants, older separatist networks, political–bureaucratic–military networks, the CIA, mafia) as fanning the southern fire, but none with any certainty.
Despite the uncertainty about who is behind the various daily killings and the so-called 'insurgency', the government has repeatedly endorsed repressive measures against people in the south, including the imposition of martial law, and an executive decree providing the government with the right to hold suspects for thirty days. Numerous disappearances have been reported by Muslim families. The Thai police or other security agents, often under pressure to produce results, have been implicated in the disappearance of scores of Muslim suspects.
The Thai case is just one example of how complex situations with long histories can fall victim to the War on Terror mentality. I am not arguing that there are no elements of a militant Islamist network present in Thailand. I am arguing that if such elements are present, they form only one part of a larger picture.When journalists and commentators with little local knowledge draw on one-sided intelligence reports (show me an intelligence agency without an agenda) to reduce historical complexity to the common denominator of Islamic jihad, the myth that the world faces a global Islamist threat is enforced. Making an effort to expose poor analysis, to highlight local dynamics, and to take part in the War on Error, is a small but worthwhile enterprise.
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