Thailand. The lost territories: Thailand's history of national humiliation By Shane Strate Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2015. Pp. 246. Maps, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Abstract

Thailand The lost territories: Thailand's history of national humiliation By SHANE STRATE Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2015. Pp. 246. Maps, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index. Shane Strate's book does not just provide new insights into the '1893 crisis', Thailand's irredentism during the Second World War, and the campaign to 'recover' Preah Vihear temple in the late 1950s; it lays out an entirely new framework for understanding a persistent dynamic of Thai history that continues to dog Thai politics to this day. In this important work, Strate essentially asks the question: If Thailand was truly never colonised, why does colonialism play such a prominent role in Thai historical narratives? He answers the question by presenting a framework that links national trauma/humiliation with national redemption. Within this schema, the chosen trauma provides a narrative framework of the chosen myth that periodically animates a discourse of national humiliation which sometimes suggests a path to national redemption. The myth is 'Thailand was never colonised'. The chosen trauma is the 1893 incident where the rapacious French coloniser 'steals' large tracts of what is today Laos and Cambodia. The nation suffers a national humiliation that is redeemed when valiant Thai soldiers seize back four territories from France in 1941. National humiliation is re-instilled when Thailand is 'forced' to return the four territories as payment of admission to the United Nations in 1946. Thailand gets another chance to recover a sliver of its national honour on the issue of Preah Vihear in the late 1950s, but once again suffers humiliation when the World Court rules that the temple belongs to Cambodia in 1962. The national humiliation discourse is once again invigorated by ultra-nationalists in 2008 after the elected government supported Cambodia's bid to have the Preah Vihear temple registered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Strate's work is important because it effectively uncovers and unites into a single framework what historians have generally treated as unconnected, epiphenomenal trends and moments in modern Thai history, connecting the dots of extraterritoriality, irredentism, and anti-foreignism. Strate is right to say that there is a paucity of historical work on Thai domestic politics during the Second World War, and he draws widely from many archival sources as well as from newspapers to paint a none-too-complimentary picture of how Thai chauvinists created the ideological atmosphere conducive to Thai imperial aspirations during the war. Strate uses the same framework of national humiliation to fruitfully examine the conflict over Preah Vihear more than a decade later. …