Abstract
This essay is an attempt to reassess the nationalism of the first Phibun government before the outbreak of the Pacific War. In Thailand, orthodox nationalism is usually equated with an ideology demanding loyalty to “chat (a Thai word for nation), religion and the king” and giving the king the highest value. This formulation does not conform to academically predominant views of nationalism and nations so well. First, nationalism is an ideological movement vesting the highest value in the nation, not the king. Thai orthodoxy is royalism rather than nationalism. Second, nation can be defined as a group of people characterized by a shared culture, popular sovereignty and equality. But the word chat scarcely has such a connotation as it usually means the country, the state or ethnic groups.
Phibun's nationalism has been blamed for deviation from this orthodoxy and characterized as militarism, statism, and cultural Westernism. He was a nationalist only in the economic aspect. In this essay his nationalism is reexamined in terms of academic (not Thai) orthodoxy. Phibun was a leader of the People's Party, which successfully put an end to the absolute monarchy and realized the popular sovereignty on June 24, 1932. A brief check of the lists of cabinet ministers since the third Mano government, starting in April 1933, proves that Phibun's first government, formed in December 1938, was not a military government but one of the whole Party. The Party, faced with a political challenge from royalist conservatives, had to make every effort to convince the people that the new regime was better than the old one. It launched economic and social development policies to improve people's lives. No less important was an attempt to turn the highest object of the people's loyalty from the king to the nation. Phibun pushed these policies further. He made June 24 a national day and held grand ceremonies on this day every year from 1939 to demonstrate the democratic and national legitimacy of the regime.
However, the masses still lacked a national consciousness, for there had been little effort to instill it either from above or from below. Insofar as Phibun intended to stabilize the new regime by vesting the highest value in the nation instead of the king, he logically had to nationalize the masses. He thus embarked on an ardent policy to create a national culture, which is indispensable for the formation of a nation. This invented culture was Thai only in name and Western in fact, because what was important was whether the people would come to share it, and no other adjective could facilitate the people's coming to share it and imagining a nation better than “Thai.&rdquot; This undertaking to create a national culture and consciousness is quite common among nationalists in this century, and Phibun must be regarded as a far more typical nationalist than the more orthodox Thai nationalists.
