Nation Building: Five Southeast Asian Histories

2. Nation and State in Histories of Nation-Building, with Special Reference to Thailand

Nation and State: Thailand • 21 21 C H A P T E R T W O Nation and State in Histories of Nation-Building, with Special Reference to Thailand Craig J. Reynolds WHEN FIVE Southeast Asian historians took up the challenge to write five nation-building histories, they embarked on a project that took as its main point of reference the nation-state. While the five histories in their final form will be very different in how they approach their respective countries, each historian accepted the nation-state as worthy of serious attention. It was not an abstraction; it was not an illusion. It was not an unwelcome European by-product of the colonial period but a real and meaningful entity that shaped the post-independence history of each country. These historians are not besotted with the nation-state, nor are they uncritical of its mortal rulers. Rather, they are not, or at least not yet, willing to discard the nation-state as the political entity whose unity, multi-cultural membership, and territorial integrity are best able to give expression to aspirations for political participation, social justice, and economic security. Not one of these historians has given up on the nation-state. They have also not given up on the nation. This willingness to take the nation as a given and something worth fighting for and writing about is not universal in post-colonial societies around the world. A case in point is South Asia, particularly in the writing of India’s history. Generalizations are always a little risky, but I would venture to say that a conversation in India today about the nation would 02 NationBldg Ch 2 16/6/05, 12:20 PM 21 22 • Craig J. Reynolds move quickly to a discussion about ethnicity, religion, communalism, or caste. Not much hope is invested in the nation, and nationalism is seen as a derivative discourse, an unwelcome legacy of colonialism. The Subaltern Studies group contributed greatly to this shift, and the words of Partha Chatterjee in The Nation and Its Fragments, published about a decade ago, are still worth recalling: The continuance of a distinct cultural “problem” of the minorities is an index of the failure of the Indian nation to effectively include within its body the whole of the demographic mass that it claims to represent. The failure becomes evident when we note that the formation of a hegemonic “national culture” was necessarily built upon the privileging of an “essential tradition,” which in turn was defined by a system of exclusions. (Chatterjee 1993, p. 134) Initially the Subaltern Studies historians were intent on explaining these exclusions and on reconceptualizing the nation in a more inclusive way, particularly with regard to the peasantry. In his manifesto announcing the aims of the Subaltern Studies project, Ranajit Guha spoke of the need to study the historic failure of the nation to come to its own.1 But many members of the group soon became involved in fashioning a historiography that explored the violent effects of that unitary discourse and that explored the histories of peoples and classes excluded by elite nationalism. To an outsider such as myself, privileged to be involved in the discussions of September 2002 as the nation-building histories neared completion, it was striking that the five Southeast Asian historians had not abandoned study of the nation. They spoke not once about the historic failure of the nation, as Guha had once put it so forcefully, and indeed at times they were intent on showing the nation’s triumphs as well as its travails. Whether or not this embrace of the nation as an enduringly meaningful political community is a distinctive feature of nationalism in the region I cannot say, nor do I have the space here to explain why Southeast Asian historians seem more willing to embrace the nation than South Asian historians. My contribution to this discussion is rather more modest, namely, to argue at 02 NationBldg Ch 2 16/6/05, 12:20 PM 22 Nation and State: Thailand • 23 the outset for the distinction that must be made between nation and state and then to suggest why the nation and nationalism are still vital topics for historians of modern Thailand. I also want to suggest why, in all the prolific writings and seminar discussions about the Thai nation and nationalism over the past three decades or so, historians of Thailand continue...