FAILED INTERNATIONALISM AND SOCIAL MOVEMENT DECLINE

Abstract

In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, South Korean social movements converted a former military dictatorship into a more democratic regime, while raising hopes for yet more improvements in the position of Korean workers and farmers. In the 1990s, Thai social movements also cast aside a military dictatorship and opened a period in which popular movements seemed poised to make yet greater gains. Yet as of 2008 it is apparent that social movements in both South Korea and Thailand have faced increased difficulties and have seen a number of significant setbacks. The authors of this article analyze what they take to be one of the reasons for these setbacks: the failure of social movements in both of these countries to more successfully internationalize their efforts. Failed internationalism is far from being the only significant factor in this social movement decline, and, moreover, it has not necessarily occurred in precisely the same way in the South Korean and Thai cases. The authors show, however, that by analyzing similarities and differences in the patterns of social movement decline between South Korea and Thailand one can discern some common conundrums faced quite generally by social movements in an era of neoliberalism and neoconservatism.

People are used to thinking and waging struggles at the national level. The question is whether the new structures of transnational mobilization will succeed in bringing the traditional structures, which are national, along with them. What is certain is that this new social movement will have to rely on the state while changing the state, to rely on the trade unions while changing the trade unions, and this entails massive work, much of it intellectual. — Pierre Bourdieu1

In the 1980s and 1990s, social movements in South Korea and Thailand confounded analysts who saw monochrome military dictatorships and demobilized labor as the prevailing norm in the capitalist cold war states of Asia.2 In South Korea, a strong labor movement emerged by 1987, consolidating a number of important gains for workers and eventually, by the 1990s, helping bring to power a series of governments that were not only far less repressive than previous regimes but seemingly more supportive of labor and popular organizations. At the same time, other Korean groups, such as militant students and radical farmers made their mark as well, not only within Korea but internationally, inspiring respect and sometimes emulation around the world.3 While modernization theorists in the Huntingtonian mode preferred to see democratic developments in Korean society as reflecting the rise of “middle‐class” forces, concomitant with economic transformation, more astute analysts have noted that Korean transformations were wrought, with blood and sweat, by the remarkable efforts of these social movements — generally against considerable opposition from the very institutional actors who later wished to celebrate and take credit for a “democratic transition.”4

In Thailand, though the social changes seemed somewhat less dramatic than in South Korea, they were nonetheless remarkable. In 1992, a seemingly long‐dormant movement against military dictatorship revived and, at the cost of considerable bloodshed, ousted a military regime from power, opening up opportunities for more exercise of parliamentary democracy.5 Though organized labor in Thailand was weaker than in South Korea, Thai workers helped produce and in turn made use of the more democratic environment to engage in more labor militancy.6 Meanwhile, an array of popular organizations struggling over rural livelihoods and various social and environmental issues also began to have considerable impact.7 Again, as in South Korea, conservative analysts preferred to give credit for all of these changes to middle‐class forces, and even to a supposedly enlightened monarch. But here too the record shows that democratic openings had to be fought for by subaltern groups, who typically faced considerable, often lethal, resistance from those at the top of the social order.8 Since neither the South Korean nor Thai transitions were complete victories for these social movements, involving considerable compromise with — and concessions to — elite forces, it is not surprising that these movements have faced ongoing difficulties and are scarcely able to claim unalloyed success. Yet even against the backdrop of such necessary humility it is notable that the years from the end of the 1990s to the present seem to have been particularly cruel to the so‐cial movements, and it would be difficult not to conclude that backsliding has in fact been considerable. In South Korea, even a strong and mobilized labor movement could not successfully overturn regressive labor legislation introduced in 1996 and in the wake of the Asian economic crisis labor's position has in many ways become even more tentative. Meanwhile, the remarkable militancy and strategic ingenuity of Korean farmers has not prevented the South Korean government from moving more fully into the orbit of neoliberal globalization, including via the South Korea‐USA Free Trade Agreement (FTA) — though farmer militancy did at least keep agriculture out of the FTA.9 Nor, in spite of considerable general public sympathy, have forces in favor of reunification with North Korea been able to move the “sunshine policy” forward very far against ongoing opposition from Korean conservatives and the U.S. government.

In Thailand, the regression has in some ways been yet more striking. Popular demands on the Thai state had made enough of an impression that the post‐crisis Thai Rak Thai (TRT) government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra found it expedient to provide a series of populist and Keynesian measures, such as national health insurance and debt moratoriums for farmers. But at the same time the TRT government engaged in conventional forms of repression of political opposition, limiting the space for left‐leaning social movement groups.10 By 2006, Thaksin had in fact generated considerable political opposition, but much of this now came from elite forces, including the military and the monarchy, and the former (with backing from the latter) eventually ousted him in the September 2006 coup.11 Remarkably— and serving as rather tragic testimony to the degeneration of Thai social movements — there was very little opposition to this coup from social movement organizations, even as the coup regime began to dismantle numerous TRT programs, including some that are very popular with workers and throughout the countryside.12

On one level, this devolution of South Korean and Thai social movements might be seen through the lens provided by world systems theorists. As Imman‐uel Wallerstein has noted, social movements through the twentieth century have been victims of their own success. They aimed to take state power, and to some extent they did so: revolutionary regimes in the former socialist world, social democratic reformist regimes in the industrial capitalist world, independent nation states in the postcolonial world. But having achieved power at the level of national states, they then had to confront the reality that power in the global political economy also moves, to a considerable extent, through transnational networks such as global commodity chains dominated by transnational corporations (TNCs). Successful conquest of state power by no means provides the ability to completely control these networks.13 Both South Korean and Thai social movements could be evaluated through this lens. South Korean activists succeeded to the extent of getting a former sympathizer with the labor movement and advocate of reunification, Kim Dae‐Jung, elected as president. Yet Kim was immediately pressured by transnational capital into numerous forms of accommodation, including signing a secret agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), prior to the 1998 election, insuring South Korea's compliance with the terms of the IMF's structural adjustment program (SAP).

IMF managing director Dominique Strauss‐Kahn (R) and World Bank president Robert Zoellick (L) during the spring 2008 meetings of the IMF/World Bank at the IMF Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Prior to his election in 1998, Korean president Kim Dae‐Jung was pressured into signing a secret agreement “insuring South Korea's compliance with the terms of the IMF's structural adjustment program.” (Credit: IMF/Eugene Salazar)

Thai activists were not quite as visibly successful, but the populist measures of the TRT government reflected their increased role in shaping Thai politics. Yet the Thai state under TRT, too, made considerable concessions to transnational capital, including moving toward a number of FTAs and reopening the case for privatization of various state enterprises, ultimately engendering the antagonism of state enterprise union leaders in the process.14

As important as international pressures on reformist states maybe, we nonetheless find such an account incomplete. In this article we want to analyze what we consider to be important origins of social movement failure in the activities and interests of domestic actors. In particular, we think that one contributing factor in the devolution of South Korean and Thai social movements has been the failure of these movements to more successfully internationalize their struggles. Specifically, South Korean and Thai middle‐class groups that would need to play active roles in helping to internationalize social movement struggles in progressive ways have more often — out of a combination of interest and iden‐tity — chosen to fold their activities into more conservative nationalist frameworks. As Pierre Bourdieu has suggested, in the opening quotation, intellectuals often play a significant role in facilitating either the maintenance of nationalist strategies of struggle or progression into more internationalized forms of struggle. In both South Korea and Thailand, a critical mass of public intellectuals, taken in the broadest sense to include student activists, has steered anti‐globalization politics — and particularly the anti‐globalization politics of the middle classes — in the direction of more nationalist, rather than internationalist, opposition. While we do not attempt to show in any definitive sense that this nationalism is narrowly responsible for social movement weaknesses — an assertion that would in any event be too narrow for our purposes—we do show that nationalist projects have been among the most prominent responses to neoliberal globalization and have weakened the engagement of South Korean and Thai social movements with broader, international forces organizing against neoliberalism.

Nationalism, however, has several distinctive forms in South Korea and Thailand. Thus, we present this analysis in two parts. First, we point to some common threads that we believe run through both cases of failed internationalism. Then we look in slightly more detail at each individual case, highlighting the nationalist anti‐globalization positions of some leading middle‐class public intellectuals and social movements with which they have been connected. Regardless of the differences between them, we believe there are some general implications of both the South Korean and Thai cases for social movements elsewhere.

Forms of Resistance to Neoliberal Globalization: National vs. Transnational

The social movements in which we are most interested here —pro‐democratic, pro‐labor, left‐popular — have to a considerable extent defined themselves against various features of the cold war capitalist status quo in Asia, including against military dictatorship, against repressive labor regimes (including anti‐union policies), and against state policies that repress peasants and farmers while commandeering and heavily exploiting rural resources. These movements have not all been systematically anticapitalist, but they have certainly been critical of the predominant forms that capitalism took in South Korea and Thailand during the cold war. Moreover, with the arrival of the Asian economic crisis in 1997–98, some of these movements came to even more aggressively identify themselves as antagonistic to neoliberal forms of capitalism, given that IMF neoliberal measures, such as SAPs, could be seen as reinforcing some disadvantageous conditions that workers and farmers inherited from the cold war era.

As such, it is useful to think of social movement tendencies in South Korea and Thailand in relation to neoliberalism, or more specifically neoliberal globalization. It is important, therefore, to first characterize neoliberalism. While it is beyond the scope of our analysis to do so in any detail here, we concur with Gerard Duménil, Dominique Lévy, and David Harvey in seeing neoliberalism as a particular class project of specific capitalist elites, especially highly mobile and globalized capitalists in sectors such as finance.15 Seeing neoliberalism in these specific class terms is more useful than accepting neoliberals' self‐definition as market fundamentalists, since the asocial neoliberal conception of the market is at best problematic and “actually existing neoliberalism” thus takes a number of discrete forms in which the hand of the state is highly visible.16 We hasten to emphasize, however, that neoliberalism is not solely the project of metropolitan capitalists or financial interests, and it has often gained active collaboration from capitalists and middle classes in the Global South,17 not to mention from some social movement groups that (rightly or wrongly) see neoliberalism as an antidote to heavy‐handed statist interventions by military dictatorships.

Neoliberal globalization, as we see it, is thus a complex project involving a variety of actors internationally, taking specific forms in specific local contexts, within the general global context shaped by the class struggle of financialized metropolitan capital against Keynesian welfare states and other forms of regulation that inhibit the favored forms of capital mobility. But even as neoliberals engage this form of class struggle, they have successfully built support by offering — perhaps more in rhetoric than in reality—two prospects that seem attractive to many nonelite groups. First, neoliberalism has been unapologetically trans‐nationalist and universalizing.18 While it has been popular in academic circles to radically critique the universalizing pretensions of any political discourse, neoliberalism has in fact proven to have considerable popular appeal insofar as it appears to speak for universal values such as human rights and individual freedoms, all presumed to be produced or abetted by global extension of capitalist market processes and property regimes. Second, and directly related to the first point, neoliberalism has claimed to speak for democracy — against dictatorships of both the left (actually existing socialism) and the right (developmental states). Legitimate questions have been raised about both the seriousness of neoliberals' democratic commitments — witness neoliberal support for the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile19 — and the meaning of the kind of democracy that is consistent with neoliberal elevation of markets to ruling forces in human relations.20 Yet, these concerns notwithstanding, neoliberalism clearly has in fact come to be associated in much popular discourse with at least a certain form of democratization,21 one that has considerable clout in countries like those of capitalist Asia, still struggling to overcome the legacies of cold war dictatorships and authoritarian developmental states.

Neoliberal globalization, then, can be defined, within the limits noted here, as transnational and pro‐democratic. This has left opponents of neoliberal globalization with a choice of strategies that can be defined against this conception of neoliberalism. Some groups have adopted strategies that can be defined as nationalist and as seemingly less strongly committed to democratization than neoliberalism. Others have adopted strategies that, though opposed to neoliberal globalization, can be called internationalist in that they attempt to oppose neoliberalism through transnational networking. These strategies have also placed considerable emphasis on democratization, though typically seeing democracy through a somewhat different lens than neoliberals.

Street demonstration at the opening of the World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, January 2005. “[G]roups that are supportive of WSF‐type agendas have been able to exercise considerable power within national states…thus creating a somewhat different basis for 'nationalist' opposition to neoliberalism (e.g., factory occupations in Argentina, Bolivarian circles in Venezuela).” (Photograph by Ken Gould)

Social movements that rely on nationalist opposition to neoliberalism have typically emphasized goals such as protecting the “national” economy against encroachments by TNCs and foreign capital. The position of such groups regarding capitalism more generally can be ambiguous. While many speak critically of TNCs, domestic capital is usually seen in a more favorable light, even if the reality of exploitation by domestic capitalists isn't entirely denied. Many such groups have been strongly opposed to privatization of state enterprises, all the more so if there is a threat that national industries will be bought by foreign investors. Few social movements supportive of such nationalist strategies have been opposed to democratization, but many regard the demands of Western labor organizations or human rights groups with some suspicion and prefer to subordinate the development of democracy to the pursuit of policies that protect a general, national interest. This, for example, can take the form of rejecting human or labor rights complaints lodged by international labor or human rights organizations — as in the “Asian values” argument pioneered by Singaporean prime minister Lee Kwan Yew and Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohammad in the 1990s.

Social movements that rely on internationalist strategies to oppose neoliber‐alism have not necessarily opposed specific nationalist measures, such as agricultural tariffs, but they have typically asserted that popular transnational organizing and pressure is necessary to push states in progressive directions as they resist neoliberal globalization. While these groups are also often critical of TNCs they thus reserve considerable criticism for states that repress popular movements in the name of the national interest. In this, they are also more sympathetic with an international human rights agenda that has come to define part of the process of democratization in certain anti‐neoliberal political circles — as can be seen, for example, by stances taken among social movement groups within the World Social Forum (WSF).

These two social movement strategies are obviously, to some extent, ideal types. Actual contexts of social struggle frequently present mixtures of these types, and specific social movement organizations can, and do sometimes, migrate from one category to another, while many may consistently occupy a shifting middle ground. Moreover, as we will illustrate below, distinctions between social movement opposition to globalization and neoliberalism are not always as clean as the ideal types outlined here imply. Nonetheless, the types are of some utility and can be identified with specific interests in specific contexts. Nationalist opposition to neoliberalism, as indicated above, might be identified with the projects of certain state elites like Lee and Mahathir, and with the various social actors that support them, ranging from domestic capitalists and certain middle‐class groups to state‐supported popular organizations and state enterprise unions. In contexts where privatization has been on the agenda, for example, state enterprise workers have often joined with specific state elites to form a potent axis of opposition. Some nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have also offered support for this kind of protectionist agenda — e.g., the Malaysia‐based Third World Network in the context of the Asian economic crisis.22

Internationalist opposition to neoliberalism, in contrast, might be identified with organizations like those that form the core of the WSF, such as the Brazilian Workers Party (Partido Trabajadores, PT) and the Landless Workers Movement (Movimiento Sin Terra, MST). These actors have often had less concrete power globally than the groups that participate in nationalist resistance to neoliberal globalization, but they have had considerable visibility. Moreover, in cases like many seen recently in South America, groups that are supportive of WSF‐type agendas have been able to exercise considerable power within national states (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela), thus creating a somewhat different basis for “nationalist” opposition to neoliberalism (e.g., factory occupations in Argentina, Bolivarian circles in Venezuela). In most of Asia, however, these kinds of WSF‐type social movement groups have been comparatively weak. Thus, we can claim that in Asia nationalist opposition to neoliberal globalization, on the paradigm suggested here, has been the more significant of the two ideal type forms of opposition.

What might explain the comparative weaknesses of internationalist strategies? A few quite general considerations are worth noting. First, all social movements, if they are to represent more than the careerism of specific movement leaders, must be based on popular forces that are struggling for concrete material improvements in their social, economic, and political fortunes. To some extent, this means that all such movements necessarily start out — even if they do not end — as place based. Second, in the process of defending themselves against repression and attempting to institutionalize gains of struggle social movements must perforce deal with the power of the nation state. Moreover, in this context, many have understandably set as their most practical goals specific objectives that can be seen as nation‐state centric — e.g., gaining new forms of favorable legislation. The amount of effort required to successfully negotiate these complex and fraught relationships with states insures that all movements will necessarily have a somewhat “nationalist” character.

What makes certain movements, like those we have alluded to in South America, less “nationalist” is therefore not that they are based less on place‐specific struggles or are less engaged in struggles with and for the state, but rather that they both extensively use internationalist strategies in their struggles and use national states to try to forward broader regional or international goals — as with the WSF's implicit endorsement of the Bolivarian experiment in Venezuela and the “Bolivarian revolution's” overt appeal to other Latin American countries. This, however, raises the question as to why certain social movements end up adopting more internationalist strategies — even against the backdrop of place‐based‐ and nation‐state‐centric struggle —while others do not. While we cannot attempt to adequately answer that question here, what we do want to suggest is that in the cases of South Korea and Thailand both geographically and historically specific factors and certain more generic features of the middle classes have been crucial in giving social movements against neoliberal globalization a predominantly nationalist orientation.

One particularly significant geographical and historical feature of South Korea and Thailand is actually shared and thus deserves mention in this general discussion. In neither South Korea nor Thailand has English or any European language been well developed as a means of communication. This, of course, reflects the specific colonial and neocolonial histories of the two countries. The linguistic heritage has a nontrivial impact on internationalization of social movements since English has become the de facto language of international NGOs and, to some extent, labor groups. It is also worth noting that, unlike Latin America, neither South Korea nor Thailand is part of a broader regional language block. Thus, unlike Latin American social movements, which can more easily engage in regional activities even without the benefit of English, South Korean and Thai activists cannot easily forge regional alliances in their native tongues.

There are, of courses, a variety of other general factors that inhibit internationalism of social movements, many of which are not so geographically and historically specific. For example, movements based among poorer social groups cannot as easily afford overseas travel, and sometimes even obtaining passports and permission to go abroad can be challenging for such groups. Thus, the participation of middle‐class groups, even within social struggles of labor or agrarian organizations, is often a necessity if such social movements are to effectively internationalize their struggles. The fact that middle‐class groups are more likely than poorer groups to have English‐language competence further highlights this necessity.

The crucial role of middle‐class groups in supporting internationalization of social movement struggles is thus something we wish to feature. Indeed, as we see it, the more conservative nationalist orientation of many South Korean and Thai middle‐class groups contributes considerably to an explanation of the failures in these countries of social movement internationalism. What we now attempt to do in the analyses of South Korea and Thailand below is to examine why this has been the case — that is, why middle‐class groups have supported neoliberal globalization or expressed their opposition to neoliberal globalization in a nationalist form. While we recognize the reasons for middle‐class nationalism to be varied, we highlight the roles of public intellectuals and social movement leaders in producing nationalist anti‐globalization discourses that allow other middle‐class actors antagonistic to neoliberal globalization to effectively rationalize their actions and interests as potentially productive of a larger social good.

South Korea: Nationalist Orientations in Social Movements and Their Impacts on Current Responses to Globalization

Early Success of Korean Social Movements and Their Current Limitations

South Korea has a reputation not only for its rapid economic growth, but also for its strong tradition of social movements and activism and the resultant success in political democratization. By the 1980s, popular quests for political democratization were increasing. Students and intellectuals — such as professors, ministers, and journalists — who were aroused by the great injustice done to the workers and other subordinated groups have since that time organized social movements against military authoritarianism, demanding more democracy and a more equal distribution of wealth and social inclusion.23 Furthermore, democratic transition since 1987 has facilitated the expansion of civil society. In this open political space, various forms of social movements have emerged in relation to labor unions, women, peasants, environmental issues, human rights, and so on. As a result, the 1990s saw a great increase in the influence of civil groups or social movements on such matters as the formation of public opinion, policy‐making, elections, and social reform.24

Despite this success, the strength of South Korean social movements has declined significantly since the mid 1990s. Especially since the Asian economic crisis in the late 1990s, South Korean social movements have been ineffective in challenging neoliberal globalization. This ineffectiveness does not reflect lack of effort, since increasing numbers of the Korean social activist groups have recognized the need for transnational resistance to capitalist‐oriented, neoliberal globalization. Korean NGOs and activist groups have tried to develop international networks with NGOs in other countries and have actively participated in some of the internationalized protests and rallies against neoliberal globalization since the mid 1990s. For example, from the streets of Cancun (Mexico), in 2003, to Hong Kong in 2005, Korean farmers led the popular resistance to the WTO negotiations. However, South Korean social movements have been unable to contribute to the construction of successful transnational resistance practices. Despite these recent efforts to transnationalize Korean social movements, the majority of Korean social activists have been more focused on national issues. Furthermore, some of the efforts to develop international networks of social movements have been initiated out of nationalist motivations, attempting to place more pressure on the Korean state by generating external support for local or national campaigns.

“From the streets of Cancun (Mexico), in 2003, to Hong Kong in 2005, Korean farmers led the popular resistance to the WTO negotiations.” In the WTO demonstration pictured above, 80 Korean farmers attempted to swim to the site of the WTO convention in Hong Kong in 2005 to protest WTO policies. (Courtesy: Scoop.co.nz)

Rise of the Ethnic and Collectivist Nationalism in Korea

The current limitations of Korean social movements in the formation of transnational alliances are related to the strongly nationalist orientation of the Korean social movements. Since the mid 1990s, there have been various forms of activism resisting globalization and liberalization in South Korea — e.g., nationwide strikes against neoliberal labor reform in 1997, demonstrations and protests against economic restructuring policies after the 1997 economic crisis, and pro‐tests against the Korea‐Chile and Korea‐USA Free Trade Agreements. These activities, however, have been influenced primarily by a desire to secure Korean national identities and interests against what has been perceived as “harmful changes led by foreign and external forces,” rather than by transnational visions for social movements.

The strong nationalist orientation of Korean social movements can be explained in terms of the ethnic‐based and collectivist nature of Korean nationalism. With regard to classifications of nationalism, Anthony Smith highlights a distinction between a civic‐territorial nationalism and an ethnic‐genealogical one.25 In the former model, which is involved with the notion of the individual as the basic unit of society and the nation as an aggregate of individuals, the ideology of nationalism is seen as strongly related to the modern nation‐building process in which the sense of citizenship and nationhood is constructed through ideological and political projects aiming at integrating individual members of society into a common and egalitarian polity.26 Hence, modern ideas such as liberalism, individualism and democracy are essential components of the former. In contrast, the ethnic‐genealogical model puts more emphasis on ethnic identity, blood‐based relations, and ancestry. Thus, it is more collectivist than individualistic. Finding a pure form of either of these two contrasting types in reality would, of course, be impossible, but it has been widely accepted that the Korean nationalism is much closer to the latter type.

Shin Gi‐Wook's recent book, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea, is very insightful in understanding the development of Korean nationalism.27 According to Shin, the ethnic and collectivist form of nationalism did not predominantly lead the formation of Korean nationalism from the beginning. When Korean nationalism was formed in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, civic, political, and individualistic elements competed with ethnic and collectivist ideas in determining the ideological basis of the new modern Korean nation.28 Faced with a national crisis stemming from the decline of the old political system of Chosun in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, Korean leaders tried to rebuild the nation by introducing “modern” values and institutions along with political and civic ideas of nation. According to Shin, however, the civic notion of the nation was not able to gain predominance because the Korean nation soon became ethnicized due to the specific historical situation of Japanese imperialist encroachment and colonization in the early twentieth century. As Shin notes:

With the onset of this “nationalist peril,” even those who had advocated individual civic and political rights came to recognize the importance of establishing the notion of a distinct Korean nation/race and of promoting a collective consciousness among Koreans to fight encroaching imperialism. In this context Koreans increasingly stressed particularistic (Korean, indigenous, traditional) over universalistic (Western, foreign, modern) elements in building a new nation.29

The collectivization of the nation continued after the liberation of Korea from Japanese imperialism. The national territory was divided under cold war geopolitics in East Asia. Under the influence of cold war hostility and pressures for national economic growth, authoritarian regimes in South Korea continued to stress the importance of collectivism and a survival mentality while promoting a nationalist ethic to demand and legitimize the sacrifice of individual rights.30 In particular, the Park Chung‐hee regime aggressively deployed the collective notion of the nation for its political and economic goals. President Park actively utilized the power of nationalism to justify his authoritarian rule by advocating political dictatorship as a means of achieving the unity of the nation based on the national will for glory. In addition, the state‐led developmentalism of the Park regime heavily relied on collectivist nationalism. The intensive mobilization of capital and labor, which was essential for the state‐led economic growth in South Korea from the 1960s to the 1980s, was justified under the ideology of economic nationalism, in which individual values, needs, and interests were seen as appropriately sacrificed for the sake of national economic growth.31

Shin argues that the dominance of the collectivist notion of nationalism has had significant impacts on Korean society and politics.32 In particular, liberalism had a difficult time taking root in Korea. Under the influence of collectivism, individualism has been equated with egoism and selfishness, and liberalism has been positioned as the opposite of nationalism. Given the general poverty of liberalism, political leaders — regardless of whether they are conservative or radical — have turned to nationalism for popular support.33 In other words, they have been able to exercise an ideological power only when their projects are combined with ethnic and collectivist nationalism. Korean social movements have also been significantly influenced by this ethnic and collectivist nature of Korean nationalism.

Nationalism and the Growth of Korean Social Movements from the 1960s to the 1980s

Right after liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, Korea witnessed the blossoming of social activism, such as labor and communist movements, which rapidly shrank in the context of the postcolonial nation‐building politics. Korea's liberation came with the division of the Korean peninsula into two different states. In the southern part of the peninsula, the U.S. military government systematically destroyed political dissidents and the labor movement. The establishment of the pro‐U.S. Syngman Rhee regime (1948–1960) and the subse‐quent Korean War (1950–1953) further reinforced unfavorable political conditions for social movements in South Korea. Military confrontation with North Korea was used as an excuse to justify violations of human rights and the suppression of political dissidents. Also, imagined or perceived communist threats from within and outside were used to legitimize the imposition of draco‐nian laws that denied civil liberties.34 In this context, social movement activities were greatly weakened in the 1950s.

Social activism reemerged in April 1960, however, when student‐led nationwide demonstrations toppled the highly corrupt and incompetent Rhee regime (called the “April Student Revolution”). Since then, even though Park's military regime harshly repressed critical social activism, various forms of social movements have made their presence felt in South Korea. The dominant form of social activism in the 1960s and 1970s was the student movement, which was significantly influenced by the ethnic and collective notion of the nation. Due to the historical experiences of the Japanese colonialism, Koreans have had strong anti‐Japanese sentiments, which have been frequently utilized by politicians and social movement leaders as a source of mobilization. For example, the Rhee regime deliberately inflamed anti‐Japanese sentiments to mobilize popular support. The Park regime, however, taking a more pragmatic approach for national economic development, tried to normalize diplomatic relations with Japan in the early 1960s in order to attract Japanese investment. This provided a good opportunity for the mobilization of social movements. Many students saw the normalization of diplomatic relations with Japan as something shameful, in which Korean national pride would be sold out for Japanese golden rings. Given this, massive student demonstrations erupted in major universities across the country in 1964 to protest the normalization of diplomatic relations with Japan. After these events, the student movement became increasingly active in South Korea. In 1967, more than fifteen thousand university and high school students protested against corruption during the national election that year. Another massive student protest occurred in 1969 when the ruling party tried to amend the constitution to allow a president to be reelected more than three times, thereby enabling President Park to continue his presidency. But, even though the social movement of the 1960s rose under the influence of anti‐Japanese nationalist sentiments, it had not yet developed into a more systemic antiforeign, nationalist movement.

Even though the Park regime was more pragmatic in its approach to relations with Japan, this does not mean that his regime was any less nationalistic. As noted above, the Park regime actively deployed collectivist nationalism to justify its authoritarian rule and national economic development policies, in which the interests and identities of individuals were sacrificed for the “glory of the nation.” In the name of the nation, national unity, or “modernization of [the] fatherland,”35 the Park regime suppressed other collective identities and compet‐ing voices. This authoritarian state notion of nation and national identity faced a significant challenge in the 1970s and 1980s, however, when the contest between state and society with regard to the nature of nation and national identity became severe.36

The nationalism of Korean activists, which was initially mobilized by widespread anti‐Japanese sentiments, became more sophisticated with the experiences of state‐led industrialization under the Park regime. After early success in economic growth, the export‐oriented industrialization (EOI) policy began to face a crisis from the late 1960s due to overinvestment and changes in international markets. In addition, some problems related to EOI began to appear, including a decline in the agricultural sector, the underdevelopment of rural areas, and the exploitation of cheap labor. Witnessing these situations, some critical intellectuals and students began to see EOI as an externally dependent economic development model, which would polarize the privileged “comprador” sector, connected through the international division of labor to foreign capital, and the impoverished “national” sector, based on the aboriginal domestic market. This would eventually destroy the self‐sufficient economic foundation of the Korean nation.37 With such a nationalist view, these critical intellectuals emphasized the need to develop a “self‐sufficient national economy” that would be independent and autonomous from all external influences.

Interestingly, the idea of the “self‐sufficient” economy was nothing new in the history of Korean nationalism. Its origins can be traced back to the agrarian nationalism that appeared in the 1920s and early 1930s, a narrative and movement that advocated an antimodern, agrarian notion of national identity.38 Korean agrarians regarded the industrialization and modernization experienced during the Japanese colonial period as the main threat to a self‐sufficient agrarian community and harmonious rural village life. Attributing colonial economic crises and social conflicts in rural regions to the penetration of capitalist forces (led by foreign capital) into villages, the agrarians argued that “the best way to save rural society from further pauperization was the removal of commercial and capitalist forces by establishing an agrarian economy based on the spirit of self‐reliance or an independent spirit.”39 With increasing discomfort over the authoritarian dictatorship and the state‐led, externally oriented industrialization of the Park regime, this nationalistic will for a “self‐sufficient” society was revived.

Despite the increasing significance of nationalist appeals, however, the Korean social movement in the 1970s was still more based on minjung (mass or people) ideology, a form of political populism antagonistic to the authoritarian dictatorship of the Park regime. Here, minjung was seen as composed of workers, peasants, the lower middle class, and the urban poor made peripheral to — or alienated from — political processes and national economic development.40

Riot police push back protesting students at the entrance of the May 1 8 National Cemetery in Gwangju, South Korea, where President Roh Moo‐hyun was marking the 23rd anniversary of the 1980 Gwangju civilian uprising, 1 8 May 2003. (AP/Yonhap, HyungMin‐woo)

In other words, the 1970s minjung movement focused on resistance against the political dictatorship, even while some critical intellectuals and activists were developing a nationalist critique of the authoritarian regime and its externally oriented industrialization policies.

By the early 1980s, however, the minjung ideology had become increasingly nationalistic.41 The turning point was the Gwangju Democratization Movement, which occurred in May 1980 in the city of Gwangju, a major city in southwestern Korea. By the late 1970s, the Park regime was facing a serious political crisis due to increasing popular discontent and the rise of political struggles challenging the authoritarian regime. This situation led to the assassination of President Park in 1979 and a subsequent rise in student activism and popular protests in pursuit of political democratization. This short period of political liberalization was dashed by a military coup in December 1979, led by General Chun Doo Hwan.42 In order to consolidate power, the Chun regime harshly repressed all the social movements by declaring martial law, sending troops to all major cities, and even massacring hundreds of civilians to put down the popular uprising in Gwangju during May 1980.

The Gwangju crackdown brought to the surface the anti‐American minjung ideology that had been a political taboo in postcolonial Korean society as students and intellectuals began to question U.S. support for the dictatorship in Korea. Since the end of the Korean War, the South Korean military has been under the control of the South Korea‐U.S. Combined Forces Command. But, when the Gwangju Democratization Movement occurred, U.S. commanders allowed the Chun regime to use South Korean troops against the civilian protesters in Gwangju. Activists saw this use of Korean armies against civilians, combined with the lack of punitive action against General Chun thereafter, as proof that the Chun military dictatorship had U.S. backing.43

In this context, Korean students and intellectuals began to articulate the view that South Korea was a U.S. colony, seeing the United States and the pro‐U.S. South Korean capitalists and bureaucrats as the main obstacles to the democratic development of Korea. Korean democratization, they argued, could not be obtained without national liberation from U.S. hegemony. Regarding this change, Shin declares:

the Korean democratic movement began to transform from “a Western‐oriented movement based largely on middle‐class resentment of Park Chung Hee's military dictatorship” to “a nationalist struggle for independence from foreign intervention and eventual unification” in the 1980s. In the course of this change in movement character and strategy, Korean activists accepted the Gramscian strategy of “war of position” by engaging in ideological struggles against the authoritarian regime, especially against the US‐supported state nationalism of anti‐Communism and developmentalism.44

With this development, the minjung concept had become more nationalist; it began to embrace those “sectors in society adversely affected by the division of the Korean peninsula and South Korea's dependent and subordinated relationship to the United States.”45 On the basis of the anti‐American minjung ideology, some of the student movement groups became increasingly nationalist in orientation, and under their leadership, the anti‐American student movement emerged in the 1980s. This movement regarded the division of the Korean peninsula as a product of U.S. postwar strategy in East Asia that aimed to contain the spread of communism. Hence national reunification began to be seen as one of the major targets for national liberation from the United States. As these nationalist groups dominated the student movements in the late 1980s, the Korean student movement became much more oriented toward the nationalist campaigns, which were promoted under the slogans of “anti‐America” and “national reunification.”

Nationalist Reactions to Globalization

In the 1990s, the nature of the Korean social movements was radically changed under new external and internal conditions for Korean society. In particular, the collapse of actually existing socialism in Eastern Europe and the introduction of a procedural democracy in South Korea after the June Democratization Movement of 1987 eroded the meaning of revolutionary and radical movements that pursued fundamental regime change in South Korea.46 In this context, the term “citizens' movement” appeared, referring to a new type of social movement that was suggested in the late 1980s and the early 1990s as an alternative to the radical and militant social activism of the earlier 1980s. This new type of social movement has been called by various names such as the civil society movement, civil organization movement, civil movement, and NGO movement.47 In this environment, new social movement organizations were established, such as the Korean Federation of Environmental Movement (KFEM), established in 1993, People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD), established in 1994, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), established in 1995, and the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), established in 2000.48 Instead of searching for a fundamental regime change, these organizations aimed at expanding democracy, which had hitherto been pursued mainly in the political sector, to various other sectors of society, including parliament, the courts, administration, and business enterprises.49 Despite the rise of the new type of social movements, which pursued different goals and directions from the previous social movements, the nationalist orientation has persisted in the mobilization of the Korean social movements and has significantly influenced the ways in which the Korean social movements have responded to globalization.

Nationalist ideological orientations — historically rooted in the anticolonial movement during the Japanese occupation, growing up with critical recognition of the externally dependent industrialization led by the Park regime in the 1970s, and fully activated by the radical student movements that emphasized anti‐Americanism and national reunification in the 1980s — have had significant impacts on the directions of Korean social movements in the 1990s and the 2000s. The radical nationalist movement was greatly weakened by the mid 1990s with the decline of radical student activism. However, the nationalist way of thinking, symbolized by the discourses of “anti‐America,” “anti‐imperialism,” and “national self‐determination,” has become a collective “master frame” that connects diverse actors in various social fields in order to build an alliance.50 The core of the nationalist antiforeign tendency is the belief that the political and economic institutions of South Korean society have been implanted by foreign powers in order to promote the realization of their interests in the region. For example, Thomas Kern quotes Lee Jae‐Kyoung as saying, “today's South Korean society is, in its fundamental nature, a neocolonial society. The principal contradiction that generates all other problems is the contradictory relationship between the US/Japan imperialism and the people of South Korea.”51 Influ‐enced by this kind of interpretive frame, a considerable part of the Korean public is very sensitive to foreign (especially U.S.) dictates, such as pressures to liberalize trade and investment policies. They often perceive such outside involvement to be an offense against South Korean sovereignty.52 Given this public sentiment, even though the concrete forms and objects of nationalist movement have changed, the nationalist tendency as a master frame, by which social activism is organized, has persisted.

Nationalist framing has significantly influenced the ways in which the Korean social movements have responded to globalization. This is well exemplified in the ways in which social movement groups responded to the economic crisis in the late 1990s. The sudden collapse of the South Korean financial system in 1997 was traumatic for many Koreans, as many analysts have noted. Korean citizens saw that their country was on the brink of economic ruin and urgently needed financial backing from outside, but the price the U.S.‐dominated IMF demanded in return for aid involved painful reforms on the part of the South Korean government. Bending to this demand was widely perceived as a sellout of political and economic sovereignty.53 In this context, nationalist campaigns emerged, objecting to foreigners taking possession of Korean properties or industries. Some NGOs even organized campaigns to pay off the national debt and protect economic sovereignty by asking donations of gold materials, collecting U.S. dollars, and promoting the purchase of the stocks of the Korean firms. Interestingly, these campaigns were designed as a revival of the “National Debt Compensation Movement” that emerged as a way of protecting national sovereignty in the early 1900s, right before the beginning of Japanese colonization. Inspired by nationalist sentiments, the Korean public gave great support to these campaigns.

Despite these popular efforts, the IMF dictates had to be accepted: import restrictions were cut back, management structures were reorganized, and unprofitable companies closed down. As a consequence, many large foreign companies acquired parts of South Korean industry very cheaply, and tens of thousands of employees and workers lost their jobs. This led to charges of U.S. economic imperialism, and nationalism became even more enflamed.

Since the mid 1990s, strong social movements have resisted the neoliberal reforms and corporate globalization that the Korean government has promoted enthusiastically. For example, when the Korean government tried to enact a new labor law in 1997 that focused on the enhancement of labor‐market flexibility, labor unions strongly protested the proposed reform by organizing massive strikes. More than 500,000 workers, approximately 82 percent of all organized workers, joined the strikes held in January 1997.54 More recently, Korean farmers have denounced the Korea‐USA FTA negotiations in order to protect Korean domestic agriculture. At a glance, these protests seem to be a natural re‐action on the part of social actors whose material interests are threatened by neoliberal globalization. The anti‐globalization movement in South Korea, however, cannot be fully explained only in terms of material interests. The nationalist orientation of the Korean social activists has also played a significant role in mobilizing the anti‐globalization protests.

In particular, many of the anti‐globalization and anti‐neoliberalism protests that have occurred in Korea since the economic crisis in the late 1990s have been deeply influenced by the belief that U.S.‐led imperialist globalization and the resultant weakening of the national economic and political sovereignty of Korea are to blame for the economic hardships the Korean people have endured since the 1997 economic crisis. The following two statements, made by some of the Korean activist groups with regard to the Korea‐USA FTA, illustrate this point:

Withdraw the Korea‐USA Free Trade Agreement, which will complete the economic colonization of Korea by the USA. [Public declaration made by Hanchongryeon, Korean Coalition of University Student Unions, 2 April 2007.]

The Korea‐USA Free Trade Agreement, which has proceeded through pro‐American nation‐selling negotiations, will threaten the lives of our minjung and destroy the foundation of national economy, so the protests against the FTA were a greatly just and patriotic act. The Korea‐USA Free Trade Agreement was a humiliating tribute, paid to the USA with the lives of minjung and the heart of national economy for the Korea‐USA military alliance. [Public declaration made by the South Korean headquarters of Joguktongil Beomminjok Yeonhap, Alliance of the Whole Korean Nation for National Re‐unification, 4 July 2007.]

Protests against the FTA were clearly not motivated by a transnational agenda in opposition to neoliberal globalization. They were based instead on a nationalist reaction to U.S.‐led imperial globalization, and they were justified as a patriotic act to save the national economy and the lives of Korean people threatened by U.S. imperialism.

Despite the nationalist tendencies of the Korean social movements, some Korean activists began turning their attention to international activism in the late 1990s, participating in international protests and rallies related to the WTO negotiations and the World Social Forum.55 This international activism started as early as the 1970s, but at that time the aim was simply to attract international support for the Korean democratization movement and to draw international attention to human rights abuses in Korea. A turning point for Korean international activism came with the general strikes against the labor law amendment in 1997. More than one hundred activists from abroad participated in these strikes, and they actively disseminated news of the event to communities outside Korea. This helped generate considerable international support for the strikes and led to the ultimate success of the movement.56 Korean activists thus recognized the significance of international activism.

Since 2000, Korean international activism has greatly increased. These new efforts to construct truly transnational networks of resistance have, however, been limited in part by the strong legacies of minjung nationalism in Korea's progressive social movements.57 The nation/state‐centric limitations of Korean international activism is evident in a number of areas. First, many Korean activists still see internationalization efforts only as a means to pressure the Korean state more effectively. Second, they still see Korea and the Korean people simply as victims of globalization, while showing little sensitivity to the problems caused by the globalization of Korean capital. Third, they tend to put more emphasis on national solutions, rather than global ones, in responding to the problems stemming from the neoliberal globalization.58 In short, then, minjung nationalism continues to have an impact even when Korean social movements attempt to internationalize.

Thailand: From Model Neoliberal State to Nationalist Reaction

Competing Nationalisms in Contemporary Thailand

As the foregoing discussion of Korea has shown, nationalism can take a variety of different forms, not only between different countries and in different historical periods but even within the same country at a given point in time. In some respects, at least two competing forms of nationalism have been at work in Thailand in recent years, especially since the Asian economic crisis that began in 1997. One version, associated with the economic project of the Thai Rak Thai (TRT) government (2001–2006), and now partly revived under the People's Power Party (PPP) government (2008‐), is rhetorically nationalist and willing to use the power of the state to discipline “un‐patriotic” dissent, but is in political economic terms highly consonant with internationalization of the economy and ongoing modernization of the countryside.59 This form of nationalism most closely approximates what we have called the nationalist anti‐neoliberal position, though at the top of the TRT alliance the orientation was far from antagonistic to participation in the global economy. Crucially, it garnered significant support from groups such as state enterprise workers until Thaksin's government began to endorse privatization of state enterprises.60

What has emerged, however, as a somewhat deeper albeit more complex form of nationalism in Thailand is what can best be called royalist nationalism. Royalist nationalism is of course associated with deference toward the monarchy and identification of the nation with the king, but it also has some specific features that are crucial to its mobilization of middle‐class interests and actors. Moreover, as we will show, it has a complex relationship to neoliberalism and globalization.

Transplanting rice in Chaiyapun, Thailand. Royalist nationalism stresses “a crucial relationship between the monarchy and the majority population of the country — still seen in most accounts as villagers, notwithstanding the recent dramatic urban‐industrial transformation of the countryside.” (Credit: Torikai Yukihiro, 2004)

The first specific feature of royalist nationalism is the identification of a crucial relationship between the monarchy and the majority population of the country — still seen in most accounts as villagers, notwithstanding the recent dramatic urban‐industrial transformation of the countryside. According to a well‐established, if factually questionable, academic tradition that still dominates Thai education, the history of the country is the history of ethnically Tai peoples, led within what became Thailand by a series of more or less benevolent monarchs, the latest of these being those of the Chakri Dynasty, which established the Thai capital in Bangkok in 1782. This historical tradition allows for there being better or worse monarchs, but is largely insistent on the beneficial or at worst benign character of monarchy — and, in more recent times, on the monarchy's role in bringing democracy to the country.61

Especially crucial to this narrative, for the legitimacy it confers, is the notion of a relationship between the monarchy and the village in which the latter has largely prospered because of the benevolence of the former. Thus, the royalist‐nationalist narrative has it that the earliest “Thai” King, King Ramkamhaeng of Sukothai (thirteenth century C.E.), noted the virtues of Thai rural life by stating that “This Sukothai is happy; there are fish in the rivers, there is rice in the field.”62 Ramkamhaeng's inscription, putatively dating from 1292 C.E., may have been produced under the Fifth Chakri Dynasty (1857–1910), in order to legitimize the Siamese monarchy's nationalist state‐building project by giving it an aura of continuity with long‐standing and benevolent royal lineage.63 The problems of empirical claims surrounding this image notwithstanding, the notion that the relationship between the monarchy and the village is strong and largely constructive has remained a central element of royalist‐nationalist discourse, becoming especially strong under the reign of the current king, Rama IX (Bhu‐miphol Adulyadej).

A second specific feature of royalist‐nationalism is the invocation of Buddhism as central to national character. King Vajaravudh (Rama VI), who reigned from 1910 to 1926, is famous for sanctifying and linking together the triumvirate of “nation, religion, king.” The nationalist element ofVajaravudh's ideology has been noted for its racist dimensions, since, among other things, it is associated with denigration of “non‐Thai” Chinese immigrants. But the invocation of religion has also had exclusionary dimensions since the reference is to Buddhism, not religion in general, and this has been part of the long‐term marginalization of ethnically Malay and religiously Islamic populations in southern Thailand. Moreover, the development of the Sangha — the Buddhist religious hierarchy — as a nationalist body sanctifying the prerogatives of the state, has accompanied this elevation of religion to a nationalist project.64

Again, however, the religious dimension of royalist‐nationalist discourse has had considerable popularity and has imbued this form of nationalism with a pu‐tatively moral dimension that is sometimes missing from other varieties of nationalism. The moral dimension of royalist nationalism allows its spokespeople to speak in quasi‐religious terms and to characterize projects and individuals in fairly Manichean fashion — i.e., as either good for the nation, for development, etc., or as malevolent. Naturally, this does not resolve issues of what is to be counted, by one interpreter or another, as benevolent or malevolent, and thus the room for social struggle over important social issues is considerable, Mani‐chean moral rhetoric notwithstanding. But the association of Buddhist good behavior with royalist nationalism nonetheless imbues it with a specific character — and, moreover, it further sanctifies the role of the monarchy itself, which, as the head of the Buddhist order, is representative not only of political power but of ethical righteousness.

We will highlight these two elements of royalist nationalism — the role of the monarchy in sustaining village prosperity and the centrality of Buddhist moral‐ism — in discussing middle‐class support for nationalism. What we now turn to is some interesting — and sometimes surprising — ways in which these elements of royalist nationalism infuse middle‐class discourse, including some forms of discourse that are presented as critical of the Thai state. To position this discussion, however, we briefly note some of the effects of the Asian economic crisis on different Thai social groups.

The Economic Crisis and Thai Nationalisms

In the immediate aftermath of the 1997 crisis, the Thai state was commandeered by the strongly pro‐royalist Democrat Party, which implemented neoliberal recovery strategies.65 However, popular antagonism to neoliberalism led to a reaction that brought TRT into office in 2001 with a significant electoral mandate for quasi‐“Keynesian” reflationary measures.66 TRT's policies met with a certain amount of success67 and had considerable support in the beginning from Bangkokians and middle‐class groups in general, notwithstanding very early demonstrations of authoritarian repression by Thaksin's government. By 2005, however, Thaksin had made enemies of a number of former allies, and more generally began to alienate middle‐class groups antagonistic both to his corruption and to forms of state spending directed to populist programs in the countryside.68 None of this prevented TRT from maintaining considerable popularity in the countryside, where programs such as national health insurance, a revolving loan fund for villages, and debt moratorium for farmers constituted a more substantive and supportive state agenda than under any previous Thai government.69 In this fashion, the two forms of Thai nationalism discussed above became more apparent and more openly competitive. TRT's policies were formally and officially “nationalist” in that they sanctioned a relatively aggressive, non‐neoliberal role for the state, even as they continued to engage the Thai economy in international trade and investment.70 But TRT itself invoked the monarchy when it suited Thaksin's interests to do so, and this reinforced the royalist nationalism described above. In the context of the crisis, King Bhumi‐phol had himself helped to further articulate and generate support for this brand of nationalism by offering his reflections on “sufficiency economy” as a potential response to the crisis. Sufficiency economy is a loose concept, seemingly drawn in part from ideas like those put forward by E.F. Schumacher in Small Is Beautiful, 71 championing small‐scale, subsistence‐oriented agriculture and high levels of village self‐reliance, as well as more general national self‐reliance. While seemingly at odds with neoliberal globalization, sufficiency economy has strong anti‐Keynesian, neoliberal dimensions in that it abjures state spending and preaches moderation in consumption, consistent with the King's long‐held antagonism to any form of social welfare state.72 Moreover, leading royalist intellectuals and economists have worked to fashion versions of sufficiency economy thought that endorse globalization — at least for the more affluent urban members of Thai society — while insisting on anti‐Keynesian policies for labor and at the village level.73 In this guise, royalist nationalism has become a complex hybrid of nationalist sentiments combined with neoliberal restraints on spending for the less privileged and engagement of the global market for the more privileged.

Former deputy prime minister Chaturon Chaisaeng speaks at a rally held behind the vocational college of Chachoengsao, along the Bang Pakong river. Leaflets posted in the area read, “Fair elections are the solution for Thailand.” (Credit: Michael H. Nelson, 2007)

Royalist nationalists and TRT's more Keynesian nationalists have jockeyed for position since the crisis, with the royalists being temporarily outflanked in the 2001 elections, regaining a position of dominance in the aftermath of the 2006 coup, and losing this again with the election of the PPP in 2008. In attempting to understand the strength of royalist nationalism, we now highlight the important role of public intellectuals — particularly several who have been influential among Thai middle‐class groups — in framing opposition to neoliberal globalization in ways compatible with royalist prerogatives and its sufficiency economy ideas.

Public Intellectuals and the Ideological Field of Royalist Nationalism

A particularly straightforward example of such an intellectual is Prawase Wasi, a medical doctor and 1981 Magsaysay Award winner, who is much revered by many Bangkokians (and others) for his public political pronouncements and his lead role in drafting the 1997 constitution.74 Prawase has for many years advocated forms of development that are centered on small‐scale, subsistence‐oriented agricultural production within the village.75 His “localist” views grow in part out of his experience as a medical doctor working to foster development and better health in the countryside, which led to his considerable skepticism regarding the structure and performance of the Thai state,76 but it is also a perspective that has evolved into an open endorsement of the king's sufficiency economy proposals in the aftermath of the economic crisis. Specifically, Pra‐wase has put forward the notion that Thailand should forego the traditional focus on GDP and instead focus on Gross Domestic Happiness (GDH), with happiness being assessed in relation to such features as mutual caring and generosity, family togetherness, strong communities, cultural confidence, healthy environment, and self‐sufficient economy.77

Prawase's approach to these issues is socially conservative and contains strong elements of Buddhist moralism.78 The notion of a pristine rural community that is the center of appropriate morality — a hardy perennial for middle classes in many societies around the world — features strongly in Prawase's pronouncements. This gives considerable weight to the desire of conservative Bangkok middle classes to see Thai rural society remain a repository of values that these classes themselves cannot or will not live. It also legitimizes a political project that attempts to keep the village frozen economically in its (imagined) past. Thus, for example, Prawase argues that Thai villagers should reduce their consumption of consumer goods and focus on rice farming and basic agricultural production (which he sees as most consistent with their happiness), notwithstanding the tremendous changes in Thai villages that have incorporated most of its members at least partially into urban‐industrial labor processes.79

Crucially, Prawase's arguments, though seemingly localist and antistatist in certain respects, preserve a central role for specific forms of authoritarian state power, especially in connection with the monarchy. Prawase has long expressed criticism of the Thai state bureaucracy, arguing that local communities should bypass it where possible.80 But this attitude toward the state is balanced by a strongly elitist view of villagers as not fully capable of managing complicated affairs of state — a position inscribed in many ways in the 1997 constitution.81 Interestingly, in the more recent context of competing postcrisis nationalisms, Prawase has shifted from abjuring the bureaucracy to abjuring elected politicians, and in the aftermath of the coup he has spoken openly in favor of curtailing the prerogatives of elected officials in favor of more discretion and control for the bureaucrats.82 Ultimately, this connects Prawase's project to an endorsement of the Crown as the ultimate bureaucratic protector of village and of national interests. In this sense, what starts in some respects as localism becomes deeply inscribed in the royalist‐nationalist ideology we have outlined.

Prawase's role in promulgating this ideology publicly is crucial because, as we have noted, his high profile allows him to effectively legitimize the sentiments of more conservative and pro‐royalist members of the middle classes, especially in Bangkok. But not all members of these middle classes are so deeply conservative, and for some a more progressive inflection is necessary if royalist‐nationalist arguments are to seem persuasive. In this sense, a second important public intellectual who provides support for royalist nationalism is more interesting because his support is more indirect. Chatthip Nartsupha is a well‐known political economist who became famous in the 1970s and 1980s for Marxist‐influenced studies of Thailand's development.83 This earlyworkhadthe potential to lead in various directions, and for some of its exponents, like Chatthip's coauthor Suthy Prasartset, it led more in the direction of dependency theory.

For Chatthip, in contrast, it led in the direction of “localism.” By the 1990s he became especially well known in public circles for a series of works charting the long history of the Thai village economy and championing the “community culture” school of thought.84 In his work on the village economy, Chatthip summarized a wealth of useful information about village practices while providing a somewhat romantic, essentialist, and misleading gloss on the overall implications.85 Chatthip suggested that the “traditional” Thai village had been oriented toward subsistence production rather than trade,86 and in spite of being affected by imperial interventions had largely retained this orientation into the twentieth century, except around Bangkok and in the Central region. This was possible, Chatthip asserted, because the Thai feudal system (sakdina) had limited impact on most villages.87 Moreover, these villages had a relatively limited class structure and little social polarization.88 Thus, though many villages faced problems connected with limited technological development, most of their difficulties had been imported by foreign forces, including Chinese merchant groups in Thailand.89 Chatthip could therefore conclude that the problem for the future is “how to preserve the good aspects of the village community — how to preserve the old‐style production relations, but improve the form and increase the productive power by developing the technology in the village.”90 In his later work on the community culture school of thought, Chatthip followed up on this kind of claim by summarizing, championing, and extending the ideas of various “localist” NGO activists and public intellectuals, including Prawase. Chatthip reiterated the notion that the Thai feudal system had limited impacts on villages,91 and explored what kinds of use villages and village‐oriented NGOs could make of the space that still remained between the state and the village, casting the most favorable projects in anarchist terms.92 While one might expect this anarchist orientation to make community culture approaches antagonistic to royalist nationalism, Chatthip's arguments in fact contain elements amenable to royalist projects. First, in asserting a primordial Thai village characterized by “kind‐heartedness, brother/sisterhood, generosity, mutual help, not taking advantage of others, unambitiousness, non‐violence, self‐reliance, honesty”93 — all of this made possible in part by relative royal noninterference — Chatthip articulated a characterization of Thai villages largely at one with royalist‐nationalist discourse. Second, Chatthip gave this a very explicitly ethnic twist by reiterating that capitalism was a wholly foreign import (Western and Chinese), rather than having royalist dimensions, as has been made clear in various accounts of Thai development.94 Moreover, Chatthip exacerbated the ethnic nationalism of his account by asserting that Chinese business leaders are incapable of political rule in Thailand.95 This too is congenial to a royalist‐nationalist discourse that sees the Thai monarchy as the most appropriate leader of the Thai peoples, even if it was not Chatthip's intention to endorse such a notion. Third, Chatthip, like Prawase and many others, endorses Buddhism as a crucial tool of community development, thus echoing royalist‐nationalist predispositions.96 And finally though Chatthip's views are rhetorically anarchist, they are also consistent with the antistatist, antisocial welfare, and neoliberal perspectives that the monarchy, the Democrat Party, and other leading national political powers have articulated. The effect of this has been that one major school of “progressive” thought — one in fact consciously endorsed by many Thai NGOs97 — has in crucial ways buttressed royalist nationalism.

Many further examples of this kind of public intellectual production could be given.98 We note the arguments of Prawase and Chatthip neither because they are entirely unique nor because they stand as independent causal forces but because they serve as useful indicators of the orientations of a number of significant political actors — especially among various middle‐class groups. Nor, despite our disagreements with the “localists” and royalist nationalists, is our brief here to contest their specific claims — something that has in any event been done effectively elsewhere.99 Our major point is simply that even in the name of “localism” and defense of the village, Thai middle‐class groups that gravitate to these forms of discourse have helped deepen the hegemony of royalist‐nationalism.

Effects of Nationalism(s) on Thai Social Movements

Thailand has thus seen legitimate antagonism toward neoliberal globalization turned in two competing conservative directions. TRT nationalism has been in many ways similar to the general nationalist anti‐neoliberalism we outlined in the first part of our argument. But royalist nationalists are now carrying forward neoliberal anti‐Keynesianism in Thailand, embodied in sufficiency economy ideology. They are prescribing a two‐tier project: globalization for the privileged and sufficiency for villagers.100 Meanwhile, support for more conventional versions of neoliberalism among various mainstream economists and politicians remains considerable. What is largely missing from this mix is any well‐developed and publicly popular variant of internationalist anti‐neoliberalism. This is not to say that no such projects — or public intellectuals — exist. To the contrary, we could cite in this vein public intellectual/labor activists like Ji Ung‐pakorn and Voravidh Charoenloet, labor NGOs like the Arom Pongpangan Foundation and the Thai Labor Campaign, critical educational forums like the Midnight University, as well as public intellectuals concerned with rural development like many of those connected to the Regional Center for Sustainable Development at Chiang Mai University. But these are far from being as prominent in public debates or as powerful in their connections as intellectuals like Prawase and Chatthip, or as activist groups like those NGOs that gain royal backing for championing maintenance of the “traditional” village.

Opposition to neoliberal globalization in Thailand since the crisis has thus been associated either with the projects of TRT's nationalist anti‐neoliberalism or with royalist‐nationalist projects. Some groups, such as state enterprise workers, have swung from one nationalism to the other, supporting Thaksin when they thought his government would oppose privatization, switching to support for the royalist coup regime later in the hope that it would reverse Thaksin's privatization decisions.101 Similarly, some NGOs working on rural issues looked with favor on Thaksin's early policy maneuvers, only to become alienated later and, in some cases, to throw their support behind the coup regime.102

The reasons why various Thai social movement actors might gravitate toward one or another of these forms of nationalism are clear, and include many of the factors we outlined in the beginning of our analysis. Moreover, that it is in the interest of certain members of the middle classes to champion one or another such nationalism is clear as well. But it is also important to note that neither of these nationalisms has so far delivered all that was promised to working classes and villagers. TRT nationalism did in fact develop certain statist social programs that are constructive and that by rights ought to be included in any progressive internationalist agenda (even if necessarily delivered by national states), such as health insurance. It is to the discredit of those supporting royalist‐nationalist reactions against Keynesianism that they are undermining such initiatives in the name of helping villagers.103 But TRT nationalism gave little to labor, and what it gave to the village in policy terms it gave on condition of subordination to TRT's project, including its authoritarianism and abuse of human rights. Royalist nationalism was reasserted through military coup, thus indicating the royalist nationalists' own lack of concern for democracy or human rights, and while in power until January 2008 these particular nationalists promised even less for labor and villages than did TRT, given the royalists' repudiation of Keynesianism. Thus, while Thai middle classes that champion one or another of these forms of nationalism may have understandable interests in and reasons for doing so, it is difficult to claim that the nationalist projects they support are more generally representative of the best (let alone the only) options for less‐privileged Thai social groups.

Middle‐class identification of one or another form of nationalism has thus strengthened the reliance of less‐privileged Thai groups on what are understandable but perhaps unproductive political projects, while limiting Thai participation in international forums that attempt to build stronger international alliances supportive of progressive social changes in the long term. Rather than attempt to help villagers build international connections and support based on their actually existing livelihood strategies of already‐internationalized extra‐subsistence production,104 TRT nationalists attempted to subordinate Thai villagers to a repressive pro‐entrepreneurial state while royalist nationalists attempted to subordinate these same villagers to a repressive anti‐Keynesian state. Rather than attempt to help workers forge international alliances supportive of strategies for protecting unions and securing living wages and better working conditions, TRT nationalists attempted to buy state enterprise union support on the cheap (throwaway promises of opposition to privatization), while royalist nationalists (briefly) offered more of the same. Finally, rather than enable broader Thai participation in international projects like those of WSF, both TRT nationalists and royalist nationalists encouraged an inward focus that emphasizes Thai uniqueness — including “Asian values”‐style arguments in support of the 2006 coup105 — at the expense of either encouraging Thai growth through international encounters or development through the participation of less‐privileged Thais.

Conclusion

All social movement struggles have to be in some respects place‐based and nationalism is an unsurprising — perhaps even, in some contexts, productive — form for the expression of any such place‐based struggles, particularly against neoliberal globalization. But nationalist struggle is not the only form that anti‐neoliberalism can take, and it is not certain either that it will always constitute the most effective or progressive form of anti‐neoliberalism. South Korea and Thailand have both experienced in recent years periods of, first, growing social movement effectiveness followed by relative social movement decline. While the reasons for this are numerous, we have suggested that one reason is the increasing emphasis within South Korea and Thailand — especially after the Asian economic crisis — on nationalist forms of resistance to neoliberal globalization. Thus, while in many South American and European countries, social movement groups were attempting to pioneer new forms of international opposition to neoliberal globalization, the involvement of South Korean and Thai groups in such projects has been very limited.

This “failed internationalism,” as we have chosen to call it, has been abetted by many factors. Given the centrality of middle‐class groups to the formation of any international project, we have focused especially on the roles of South Korean and Thai public intellectuals in legitimizing nationalism (in various forms). Each of these cases, as we have shown, is somewhat unique, though each case of public intellectual nationalism, we suggest, has contributed in similar fashion to weakening social movements. We have not speculated here on why, in a relative sense, the activities of public intellectuals in places like South America has been somewhat different, but certainly a broader examination of a number of cases might contribute to our understanding of how and why internationalist opposition to neoliberal globalization is stronger in some places than in others.

Notes

1. Bourdieu 2003, 43–44.

2. See Deyo 1989.

3. Kim and Wainwright 2007.

4. Cumings 2005, 342–403.

5. Connors 2007.

6. Ungpakorn 1997.

7. Glassman 2002; Glassman 2004b.

8. Ockey 2004; Connors 2007; Ungpakorn 2007.

9. Wainwright 2007.

10. Glassman 2004a; Pasuk and Baker 2004.

11. Ungpakorn 2007.

12. Ibid.

13. Wallerstein 2000.

14. Brown and Hewison 2005; Ungpakorn 2007.

15. Duménil and Lévy 2004a; Duménil and Lévy 2004b; Harvey 2005; see Glassman 2005.

16. Brenner and Theodore 2002; Peck and Tickell 2002.

17. Cox 1987; Biersteker 1995.

18. See, for example, Friedman 2007.

19. Harvey 2005.

20. Parenti 1983.

21. See Robinson 1996.

22. Hewison 2000.

23. Park 2001.

24. Kim 2006, 101.

25. Smith 1991.

26. Storey 2001, 66.

29. Ibid., 119.

27. Shin G‐W 2006.

28. Ibid., 116.

30. Shin G‐W 2006.

31. Park 2001.

32. Shin G‐W 2006.

33. Ibid., 133.

34. Park 2005, 263.

35. Shin G‐W 2006, 167.

36. Ibid., 166.

37. Park 1978; Chung 1995.

38. Shin G‐W 2006, 141.

39. Ibid., 143.

40. Choi 1993.

41. Shin G‐W 2006, 171.

42. In 1981 General Chun Doo Hwan unilaterally assumed the presidency.

43. Park 2005, 272.

44. Shin G‐W 2006, 170.

45. Choi 1993, 17.

46. Kim 2005, 125.

47. Shin K‐Y 2006, 6.

48. Kim 2005, 126.

49. Kim 2006, 103.

50. Kern 2005.

51. See Kern 2005, 260; Lee 1993, 125.

52. Kern 2005, 260.

53. Ibid., 267.

54. Park 2001.

55. Kim 2006, 117.

56. Won 2007.

57. Kim 2005, 127.

58. Won 2007; Jeon 2006.

59. Glassman 2004a; Glassman 2007.

60. Brown and Hewison 2005.

61. Hewison 1997, 59–62.

62. Peleggi 2007, 23.

63. Reynolds 2006, vii.

64. Keyes 1987; Jackson 1989; Peleggi 2007.

65. Pasuk and Baker 2000; McCargo 2005.

66. Glassman 2004a; Pasuk and Baker 2004.

67. Glassman 2007.

68. Kasian 2006; Pasuk 2007.

69. Ungpakorn 2007.

70. Glassman 2004a; Glassman 2007.

71. See Handley 2006.

72. Hewison 1997, 67.

73. Glassman 2008.

74. See www.prawase.com.

75. See, for example, Prawase 1988.

76. Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation 1981.

77. Prawase 1998.

78. Prawase 1988.

79. Ibid.; and Prawase 1998.

80. Chatthip 1991, 124.

81. Connors 2007.

82. Walker 2007b.

83. Chatthip and Suthy 1981; Chatthip, Suthy, and Montri 1981.

84. Chatthip 1991.

85. Bowie 1992.

86. Chatthip 1984, 34–38.

87. Ibid., 74–75.

88. Ibid., 31.

89. Ibid., 55–57.

90. Ibid., 76.

91. Chatthip 1991, 132.

92. Ibid., 133–41.

93. Ibid., 132; see Chatthip 1984, 74.

94. Hewison 1989; Suehiro 1989; see Chatthip 1984, 44–59.

95. Chatthip 1991, 134.

96. Ibid., 140.

97. See, for example, Chatthip 1991; Somchai 2006, 62–64.

98. See Hewison 2000; Pasuk and Baker 2000, 193–216.

99. See, for example, Bowie 1992; Yukti 1995; Hewison 2000.

100. Glassman 2008.

101. Brown and Hewison 2005; Ungpakorn 2007.

102. Glassman 2008.

103. Ungpakorn 2007.

104. See Walker 1999; Walker 2007a.

105. Glassman 2008.