Irredentism :Thai Nationalist Feelings(01) was shared mainly by young officers in the Navy and the Army.

Irredentism :Thai Nationalist Feelings(01)

Perhaps the most significant of all aspects of Thai nationalist feeling during the first Administration of  PM Phibunsonggram (in the period between 1938 to 1944) was the propensity to irredentism which was shared mainly by young officers in the Navy and the Army.

There were two sides to this irredentism. The more prominent had to do with the recovery of the various territories which Thailand had been obliged, virtually at the point of a word, to surrender to France in the course of the previous 50 years or so. The policy of France towards Thailand had, in the main, been seen as harsh and overbearing.

Thais remembered with anger and bitterness the incident in 1893, when French gunboats forced a passages up the Chao Phraya River to Bangkok and when terms, involving cession of territory, were dictated to the Thai government under the threat of bombardment of their capital.

Historical experience thus contributed to the Thai’s hatred of the French. There had continued to exist among the Thais an irredentist feeling directed against France and aiming at the recovery of those areas given up to it at one time or another.

Irredentism :Thai Nationalist Feelings(02) Relations between Thailand and France.

Irredentism :Thai Nationalist Feelings(02)

In the New Map of Asia published in 1919, Herbert Adams Gibbons correctly predicted what would happen in the future relations between Thailand and France. He wrote:

French policy towards Siam has had the opposite effect to that which it was intended to have. The French thought they were extending their influence in the peninsular, and making a greater Indo-China. They could afford to trample upon Siam’s feeling and ignore Siam’s rights. But the Siamese were rendered bitter enemies instead of being cultivated as useful friend for the future. Extension of her colonial domination at the expense of Siam will mean one day for France the necessity of getting out of Indo-China together. If she does not go without  resistance, the Siamese will help in putting her out.

Gibbons made this prediction more than a decade before cordial relations between Thailand and Japan were established. Hence it is far from true to say that Thai territorial demands on Indo-China were put forward at the instigation of Japan. The demands had their ultimate origin in the old irredentist feeling against France, though the Japanese did not neglect to intensify and exploit that feeling to suit their own purposes.

The other and less prominent side of the irredentist movement arose from the transfer by Thailand to Great Britain, under the terms of the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909, of the former’s sovereignty over the four Malay States of Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan and Tengganu.

Irredentism :Thai Nationalist Feelings(03) Claims to Recover Former States

Irredentism :Thai Nationalist Feelings(03)

Claims to recover these states had never been taken seriously except by the more extreme among Thai nationalists. On the one hand, these States had never formed an integral part of the Thai Kingdom, but were merely vassals paying a nominal annual tribute to Bangkok, whilst, on the other hand, they were inhabited by Muslim Malays who differed fundamentally from the Buddhist Thai in race, language and religion.

Moreover, the transfer of suzerainty in 1909 was effected quite willingly by the Thai government, in return for the surrender by Britain of most of the extra-territorial privileges which British subjects had previously enjoyed by Treaty in Thailand.

There was no hint of compulsion about the transaction. The Thais obtained what they required, that is, jurisdiction over British subjects in Thailand proper and a loan, which eventually came to 4,000,000 pounds to build a southern railway.

They obtained this loan from the Federated Malay States. Given these factors, the Malayan side of the Thai irredentist agitation wore in consequence the appearance of having been put forward in order to cover the bitter founded demand for the retrocession of Thailand’s lost provinces in French Indo-China.

The difference in Thai attitudes may, however, be explained also by economic factors. In the first place, Britain was Thailand’s neighbor on two frontiers which then possessed the most formidable power in South-East Asia. Thirdly, until the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, British shipping came second in the list of tonnage cleared in Bangkok’s port. Fourthly, in 1939 the British empire accounted for nearly 41 per cent of Thailand’s foreign trade.

Irredentism :Thai Nationalist Feelings(04) Map of the Ancient Frontiers of Siam 150 years Ago.

Irredentism :Thai Nationalist Feelings(04)

The Thai irredentist movement first came to public notice in 1936, when the Army Geographical Service of the Ministry of Defense published a “Map of the Ancient Frontiers of Siam 150 years Ago.”

This map purported to show the various regions which Thailand had lost at one time or another to France and to Britain, which included the greatest part of the Shan States and Burma, all the territory of Laos, including the upper valleys of the Red River in North Vietnam, and the whole of Cambodia.

This map was prepared under the direction of the Minister for Public Instruction; 10,000 copies were made and distributed in the schools and public establishments in Thailand.

It claimed that Cambodia had passed from the possession of the Thais into that of the French in 1863, and it went on to indicate numerous cessions of territories by Thailand to France between 1888 and 1907. With regard to British territories, no only did the map claim as being at one time Thai possessions, the Malay States of Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan and Prengganu, but it advanced the same claim for Tavoy (represented as having been taken by Burma from Thailand in 1797X and for Penang, which was ceded by Kedah to Britain about the year 1800.

Irredentism :Thai Nationalist Feelings(05) Both Britain and France Protested at the Publication of the Map

Irredentism :Thai Nationalist Feelings(05)

At the time of its first appearance, both Britain and France protested at the publication of the map in question, but their protest was met with the reply from the Ministry of Defense that the purpose of the map was to educate the Thai people in the history of their native country.

Subsequently the map more or less disappeared from public view, but it was put into circulation again as a result of the intense agitation which was set up in Thailand, for the restoration of its lost provinces in Indo-China.

Since this map advanced Thai territorial claims to Malaya to the South as well as to Indo-China to the East, Premier Phibunsonggram assured Sir Josiah Crosby, the British Minister in Bangkok, more than once that he had no wish nor intention to ask for the restoration of the rights which his country gave over to Britain in 1909 with respect to the four Malay States.

He told Crosby that it was useless for Thailand to interest itself in such a thing, in view of those differences—religious, linguistic and racial—between the Malays and the Thais.

The Thai Premier went on to tell Crosby that he was seeing to it that vehement anti-French agitation in the Thai vernacular press did not extend to the British or pass over into demand for the cession to Thailand of territory in Malaya. Being prudent, Phibunsonggram knew that the Thais had to be careful not to antagonize simultaneously their powerful neighbors in the West (British) and those in the East(French).