The State and Ethnic Politics in SouthEast Asia by David Brown

Author:David Brown [Brown, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781134797066
Google: eRGGAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2003-09-02T03:38:07+00:00

INTERNAL COLONIALISM IN THE NORTHEAST

In order to examine the nature of internal colonialism in the Northeast it is necessary to see it in historical perspective. Prior to the late nineteenth century the peripheral regions of presentday Thailand had remained semi-autonomous of the Thai state, subject to intermittent tribute. In the 1890s, formal political control was established and between the 1890s and the 1930s the peripheral regions were subjected to increasingly effective administrative control from the centre.52 The extent and nature of state penetration of the peripheries has progressively increased, and two major phases may be distinguished.

From the early twentieth century until the late 1950s Bangkok sought sufficient control over the peripheral communities to extract the taxation revenues and labour which were needed for the expansion of the metropolis. This involved the incorporation of the peripheral regions into the centralized administrative system and the introduction of education in the Central Thai language. Such interventions did not, however, involve any attempt to actively change the local economies and internal cultures of the peripheral communities. In the economic, political and cultural realms, the peripheral communities were treated as subordinate and inferior, so that the policies pursued by the state involved a combination of neglect and extraction.

During this period the peripheral regions were under-allocated in national budgets and in state and private investment. The importance of these regions as pools for cheap labour increased when Chinese immigration was restricted after 1949. This led to increased migration from the periphery to Bangkok, and thence to increasing awareness on the part of North-easterners of their relative deprivation, the hierarchical cultural division of labour, and the incidence of discrimination. Moreover, by the 1950s various other factors were promoting change in the centre-periphery relationship. The transition to the second stage of Bangkok’s industrial development required expanded investment, which implied the need for increased supplies of labour, raw materials, and foodstuffs from the peripheries. Further central intervention was also indicated by the spectre of communist insurgency, which was fostered by events in China, Laos and Vietnam.

From the late 1950s until the present, the autonomy of the peripheral communities has been increasingly eroded by state interventions and by the spread of the capitalist economy. State interventions have arisen from the concern of the state to pursue policies of ‘rural development’ so as to improve the infrastructure of the regions, promote agricultural diversification and productivity, and promote industrialization. In adopting such rural development policies the state has had two main concerns. First, agriculture in the periphery has hitherto been of low productivity and has been oriented largely towards subsistence. Thus, if diversification and productivity increases can be achieved, then the regions can contribute more to the urban area of Bangkok and to the national economic revenues. Second, it was widely argued by American aid donors amongst others, that the poverty and deprivation of the peripheral rural communities, found most clearly in the Northeast region, was the fundamental cause of the support which the CPT received from the early 1960s. The argument

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