Stateless Peoples

A Keynote address at the Southeast Asian Studies’ seminar on

“Lives of the Stateless Peoples and Unidentified nationalities”

At Sriburapha Auditorium, Thammasat University, Bangkok.
22 February 2008

Stateless Peoples

By

Professor Benedict AndersonCornell University

Let me begin my remarks today with a few words about the global place of Thailand along two simple axes. In terms of geographic spread, the country ranks as Number 49 out of the roughly 200 generally recognized independent states, i.e. at the bottom of the leading 25%. Slightly bigger than Spain, slightly smaller than France. A lot smaller than Texas, but a lot bigger than New Mexico. In terms of population it ranks much higher, i.e. Number 19, or within the leading 10%, just above France.

Like all the states above it, and also like most of the states below it, Thailand’s population includes many ethnolinguistic and religious groups. You could also say that by combining the two axes, Thailand comes out as a reasonably important middle-range nation-state.

If the above information will not be a surprise to you, I would like to offer you another kind of picture, so that we can consider the question of ‘peoples without states’ in a broad context. Out of the roughly 200 states mentioned above, no less than 61, or about 30%, have populations less than 3 million, a figure substantially less than half of the population of Krung Thep Maha Narok. 34 states have less than a million people, and 15 have less than 100,000. What kind of entities are these microstates? Many are small islands in the Caribbean, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Indian, and the Pacific oceans, and can be said to be products of European imperialism and colonialism. But there also plenty in Europe itself, mostly relics from the feudal era. With the exception of the European and Persian Gulf cases, these states are poor, vastly dependent on outside aid, and relying for survival on tourism, and, in some cases on banks which specialize in hiding the wealth of the world’s richest people who are eager to avoid being taxed at home. How many of them are really ‘nations’ is also a serious question, so that one might also think of them as ‘states without nations.’

I bring this material to your attention for three reasons. The first is to remind you that it is quite possible for ‘ very small peoples’ to gain states and thus the status of ‘nation-states’ and have seats in the United Nations. So that the ambition of some stateless people to have their own states is not at all irrational, though it usually very risky and lead to much loss of life. The second is to underline the fact that most such microstates are doomed to perpetual dependence on foreign aid, foreign tourists, and foreign tax-evaders in order to survive. The third is that there is no reason to suppose that the rulers of such states will automatically behave well towards their own peoples. By my rough estimate, only about two thirds of them can be said to be reasonably democratic. So the question of peoples without states should be discussed without sentimentality, and in a global-historical context.

2

The next question that we should be thinking about is what we mean by ‘peoples without states.’ In some obvious ways, we should realize that they do not really exist any more today. If we look, for example, at our own region, Southeast Asia, as recently as the end of World War Two there were still substantial areas which were essentially stateless. We could include here the vast, largely unknown mountainous terrain of West Papua, held weakly by Dutch colonialism until 1962, and then transferred formally to Indonesia without any local peoples’ consent. We could also include a huge mountainous belt comprising parts of northern Burma, even parts of Thailand, as well as northern Laos and Northwestern Vietnam. Occupied by nomad and sedentary ‘hilltribes,’ which were part of post-colonial Burma, Laos and Vietnam in atlases, in every day reality they were little touched by these states. Part of Thailand itself was essentially controlled not by Bangkok but residual Kuomintang warlords. But over the last sixty years the real autonomy of these hilltribes has drastically declined as a result of state expansion, the spread of capitalism, and in many cases long and bloody wars.

It is also worth asking ourselves when and how these and other comparable groups came to be thought of as ‘peoples.’ We know that for centuries Spanish colonialists referred to the various Muslim groups in Mindanao and Sulu as ‘Moros,’ the Spanish word for the Moors, originally meaning Catholic Spain’s Muslim enemies along the north shore of the Mediterranean. But it was only in the 1970s that these peoples began to call themselves, without irony, the bangsa Moro, or Moro People. We know that while for centuries Dutch colonialists called all the immigrants from Southeast China, and their descendants, “Chinese,” these people, mostly illiterate, speaking mutually unintelligible Hokkien, Hakka, Cantonese, and Hainanese, did not think of themslves as ‘Chinese” till the 1890s. Up till more or the less the same time, the ruling class of Siam spoke of Hor (arriving by land) and Jek (arriving by sea) as if they were different peoples. The East Timorese, composed of at least 14 social groups speaking mutually unintelligible languages , only became a people in the late 1960s. A nice illustration of this problem comes to us from British India. When the authorities finally had the power to hold a census in remote Buddhist Ladakh, in the 1920s, they made the mistake of asking the local people “who they were,” and received over 300 different replies, (including I am a trader, I am a monk, I belong to Clan X or Y, I am a Shia, I am a widow,and I moved here ten years ago.) Annoyed by this multitude, for the next census the British decided on 30 or so categories of their own, and forced the locals to belong to one or another of them. So there is plenty of evidence for the old idea that it is commonly not peoples who create states, but states that create peoples. This most likely is how in fairly recent times ‘peoples’ like the Hmong, Lisu, Yao, Karen and so forth have gradually learned to see themselves as peoples. People in Bangkok usually speak of the Far South, as the violent place of Malay-speaking Muslims. It is possible that in the end they call into being just such a ‘people.’ But not yet, because the locals in Satun are not violent, and still do not share a common imagined identity with those of Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat.

This phenomenon - which we can all the gap between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ identity – is, in different forms, visible everywhere. If I ask someone in Bangkok where she is from, she will not say from Thailand, but rather ‘Songkhla or Isan,’ but if I meet her in Singapore she will say I am from Thailand; and if we in meet in Chicago, she might easily say I am from Asia, if she thinks I have never heard of Thailand.

The point of all this is to remind ourselves that the identities of peoples are historical, relational, and imagined, not essential and unchanging. One must always ask oneself, when did states start to imagine a group which it called, or better, named, a people. When did people start to take over this imagining? In ways does this imagining depend on who asks the question: Who are you? Always the most important questioner is the state. This applies just as much to ‘the Thai people’ as to any other.

3

One can, at least in theory, make practical distinctions between different kinds of peoples without states, even if this title is, as I suggested earlier, actually out of date. Meuang Thai offers some good examples of the three commonest types. One group consists of peoples who in theory have real national states, but these states lie outside Thailand’s borders. The obvious examples are the Khmer-speakers north of the Dongrak chain, especially in Buriram, Surin, and Sisaket, who are perfectly aware of the Khmer nation-state south of the mountains; or the Lao-speaking people on the west bank of the Mae Khong, who can see Prathet Lao on the opposite side of the river. A second group consists of peoples who believe they once had a state of their own, but have long been deprived of it. In the far South, facing the Gulf of Siam, the memory of the Keradjaan of Old Pattani is quite strong, since it was abolished by R V only a century or so ago. Northerners have comparable memories of Old Chiangmai, even if they do not wish to remember too clearly two centuries of quiet life as part of the Burmese empire, and a notable if secondary role in the destruction of Ayuthaya. Perhaps one should think of the Jin in the same way. The Mon are a hybrid case, since the great Mon kingdom of the past lay in today’s Southern Burma, where even today the majority of Mon actually live. The third group consists mainly of hilltribes and the Chao Le, who probably never had real states of their own. Each of these distinct groups is ‘stateless’ in a quite different sense, and to think about them one has to keep these differences clearly in mind.

Group l. In the cases of Northern and Southern Isan, it does not seem to me that any very serious problems arise today (though Isan in the 1950s and 1960s was another matter). In all the regions, the institution of universal adult suffrage, unsteady democratization up to a point, the rapid spread of educational institutions up to the tertiary levels in almost all provinces, the successful spread of developmental capitalism, and the ease of internal migration, has created conditions in which these ‘peoples’ have a strong stake in the existing order, or useful lack of order one might say. Powerful veteran politicians like Newin Chidchob and Sanoh Thianthong campaign locally in Khmer but address the parliament in Bangkok Thai. The same could be said for powerful Lao-speaking politicians from the upper Northeast.. Enormous numbers of Lao-speakers have been migrating to Bangkok and all over the rest of the country. Educational expansion has given more opportunities for ambitious people from these regions to create successful businesses and enter the national bureaucracy and military. Isan also has the very large numbers to make an Isan bloc in parliament as serious matter. Beyond that, if they look across the borders at Laos and Cambodia, they see countries enormously poorer, with authoritarian regimes, and no obvious futures for Isaners themselves. Much the same is true of the lukjin who are pervasive in the middle class in Bangkok and upcountry, and feel they are doing very well. The rapid rise of China to world-power also gives them security for the long-term future. What all these groups may want is mostly something that Bangkok can easily give if it wishes, cultural acknowledgment, less contempt, more room for ‘ethnic’ selfcultivation and autonomy. Real political power, of course, is another matter, as we have seen over the past 5 years.

Group. 2 The three cases have some things in common, but they are also quite distinct. Although in some ways the “khon meuang” often feel that they are a people with their own distinct history and culture, the absorption of Chiangmai into the Bangkok state was not terribly violent, and, up to a point, this distinctiveness is acknowledged by that state. The descendants of the old jao are still there, even if they do not matter much. The region is prosperous and Chiangmai is the country’s second city. Access to national-level institutions has been growing, and Thaksin’s rise to power brought a Northerner to the national Prime Ministership for the first time. One does not get the impression that there is a real problem for another reason, which is that the language of the North is not very distant from Central Thai, and has obvious affinities with the vernacular of Isan. One might even say that the base of the Thaksin regime’s electoral power has been exactly a coalition of the North and the Northeast. Thailand’s Mon have long intermarried with Central Thai and Chinese, and they are quite aware of their contributions to ‘national’ music and the plastic arts. But they are also aware that they have life a good deal better in Thailand than than their cousins in Burma (rather like the Khmers in Surin), and, so far as I can tell, do not spend much time thinking about the grand medieval Kingdom in the Irrawaddy delta. Yet their numbers are too few, and their grip on the Mon language is today too weak, to create a serious regional block, like the North and Isan.

The Muslims Malays of Old Pattani are, as we are well aware, a completely different story. In the days of the old Thai imperial monarchy, they were periodically suppressed by force of arms, and compelled to accept the distant Thai rulers as suzerains. But the lower Chao Phraya flatland state itself was too primitive and ramshackle to do much more than exact tribute and carry away populations, so that Old Pattani was largely left alone till the times of Rama V, and his competitive horse-trading with the expanding British Empire. Unlike Satun, which for its own reasons cooperated with Bangkok, Old Pattani came to be ruled by officials from Bangkok, who despised everything about the place and the people. They were Sunni Muslims, unlike the mainly Shia Muslims of Central Thai, long accommodated by the state. With distinctively darker skins, curlier hair, etc it became easy -- as Western racial theories spread East -- to think of these darker people in racist terms. Very stubbornly, they insisted on speaking Malay, which had no filiation with the Thai languages and which the rulers almost never bothered to learn. They had also almost no state recognition, since the nominal head of the national Muslim community, appointed by the Thai monarch, was usually a Shia or residing in Bangkok and Thai-speaking. They experienced isolation, poverty, and often persecution. Furthermore, modern Bangkok has always had the bad habit of not dismissing from service cruel, incompetent, corrupt and stupid state officials, preferring to merely transfer them to remote and poor regions of which the Far South was the best example. You could say that administratively speaking, the Far South was like the toilet bowl of the state machinery. Furthermore, few Bangkok people think that hese conquered people have had anything to contribute to the modern nation, unlike the peoples of the North, the Northeast and the Mon.

Some years ago I described the real attitude of the Suharto dictatorship towards the resource rich provinces of Acheh and West Papua as: we don’t want the people, we just want the land and the resources. If they disappeared tomorrow, we wouldn’t miss them for one minute. There is something here that echoes with what I have said above. The special difficulty for Bangkok is however that the Far Southerners (except in Satun) not only carry a historical state-identity with them, but have substantial population bases, in a concentrated area, as far away from Bangkok as any part of the realm, and just next door to the Malay-controlled state of Malaysia, with a pretty porous border. They are also more and more aware of being part of a vast Muslim world across several continents, an awareness embedded in the ancient tradition of the hajj to Mecca. The educated sector is also aware of what I mentioned at the start of this talk, which is that the UN has plenty of members which are smaller in geographical size and lower in population than what is left of Old Pattani.

The Bangkok state’s own national myths make it impossible to recognize openly that the Far South does not really belong to Thailand in any strong way, or that it ‘owns’ the region out of simple conquest and a deal with London. Yet it is useful to remember that during World War II, it grabbed, with Japanese help, substantial parts of western Cambodia, northwestern Burma, and still more of the southern peninsula. But in 1945 the Allies forced Bangkok to give these new possessions up, and noe one cares today that they were lost. At the same time, Bangkok has no idea what to do with the Old Pattani, except to offer some minimal carrots and a lot more sticks. Bangkok has always thought that time is on its side, but the reality today suggests the opposite. The necessary minimum change would be real political and symbolic autonomy, but this would mean consciously and deliberately rectifying the mistakes of the much revered Rama V (who, when he visited the Muslim South never visited a single mosque). Yet the example of Malaysia itself is suggestive. It is still in many ways a stable federal state, in that all the old or not so old monarchies are still in place, and Malaysian Muslims, especially in rural areas, are attached to them. The state has ingeniously found a way to combine these loyalties with the nation-state by rotating the office of head of state among these small rajahs. Conversely, Rama V’s policy was to get rid of all local monarchies but his own, and it is still unthinkable today that this policy could be abandoned. My personal view on this matter that basically there is no Far South problem, but there is a huge Bangkok problem.

Group 3. The peoples in this group are in the worst position of all. Ineluctable population pressure from the flatland Thai, modern communications especially transportation, massive logging (and in the case of the Chao Le) high-tech commercial overfishing, military and police power available to Bangkok greater than ever before in history, mean that the old option of strategic retreat into more remote and difficult terrain has really vanished for good. These people are small in numbers, scattered in their habitats, and unsophisticated in modern means of social and political organization, hence they have few of what James Scott famously called ‘the weapons of the weak.’ Only a handful of them have reasonably good secondary, let alone tertiary education, and this elite can usually be coopted. Many of them face a special disadvantage which we can better understand by reminding ourselves that the most oppressed people in modern Europe, up until today, have been the Gypsies. The basic reason is that the age-old tradition of the Gypsies is nomadism, constant movement across state boundaries. All modern, and also mediveal states, have hated moving populations, because they are hard to monitor, to empress into armies, and to force to pay taxes.

If the people I have been talking about earlier would like better access to the Bangkok state, or dream about reviving their own old states, the people in group 3 for the most part have always been stateless peoples, and, most of the time, have been happy with their statelessness. But is just this statelessness that nationalist, Buddhist, monarchical Bangkok finds it impossible to imagine.Furthermore, no one but a scattering of Christian and Buddhist missionaries and anthropologists has any interest in Group 3’s languages or cultures.

How lowly they are regarded, and how little they are thought capable of contributing to the national identity is shown by characteristic state policies: a curious mix of charity, contempt, ignorance, indifference, and brutality. It is worth thinking about the historical fact that the only people within Thailand’s borders to have suffered napalm assaults from Bangkok have been the Hmong. It is thus probably typical that some of these Group 3 people find it difficult even to get the papers which would confirm that they are fellow-citizens of the rest of the country’s population. (In this context it should be noted that, partly because of Thailand’s strong monarchical traditions, the concept of citizenship is pretty weakly developed.) This is, for the peoples in Group 3, a pity, since anthopologists have shown us that they are much more egalitarian in their customs than the rest of the country.

In the longer run, in order to survive, they will have to make some bold adapations to the situation that they have a state, or perhaps better, a state has them. These adaptations will also have to be primarily political , though with social and cultural support. In effect they will have to make political noise, and also ally themselves with other people who are in the same boat. Whether Bangkok will listen to them, or have any creative ideas about how humanly to accomodate them is something for us all to think about very seriously.

Thank you!