Después de la reforma del Código Civil

Ban Thong was the first community to be established in my research area in 1851 when villagers from Laos brought elephants across the Hueang River to graze. Due to a river flood they ended up staying there. According to a written collection of village histories in Loei province, the other villages on the Thai side of my research area were established between the late 19^th and the early 20^th century (Thongdam 1984). Their stories of origin all involve some form of migration from Laos, with the first settlers in Ban Plee fleeing a cholera outbreak in the Lao village across the river in 1877. Ban Sing’s first inhabitants, it is mentioned in the book, migrated from Laos in 1925. Ban Donmai’s complex legend of origin entails a princess who hands over the reign of the village to her brother in a neighbouring village (on the Lao side of the river).

These stories of origin are revealing in that they capture some of the disruptive processes including environmental challenges and shifts in power and control that are characteristic of the whole area’s history, some of which I will present in this chapter.

At the same time, they involve migratory patterns across the Hueang River, which substantiate the historical (and kin-based) connection between people on either side of the river that marks the border today. The historical bond between villagers on either side of the river was emphasised by many of my interlocutors, particularly by those who cross the river on a regular basis for the purposes of trade and/or visiting kin. When discussing the history of the area, many of my interlocutors referred to the time before 1975 in a very nostalgic way, describing it as the time when the adjacent Thai and Lao

border villages were perceived and lived as “one village” rather than as separate units divided by the border.

Although the Thai-Lao border already agreed upon in 1893 (and 1904 between Loei and Sayaboury) my interlocutors highlighted the year 1975 as the most significant in the history of the area, particularly with regard to small-scale trade across the Hueang River. According to my interviewees, the communist takeover in Laos in 1975 led to a military enforcement of the border, accompanied by an influx of refugees from Laos to Thailand. This was followed by a series of border wars in the nearby area. While I will take a closer look at the effects of the reinforced border from 1975 in Chapter 2, here I will focus on the historical becomings of the border before 1975. If the nation-state border was only reinforced from 1975, how did the border come into being before then?

Aiming to unravel some of the historical events, developments, and actors that inform the becomings of the border in my research area until 1975 and placing them in the broader historical context of the region, the chapter begins with an overview of the region’s power constellations and the regulation of trade already before the first Thai-Lao border agreement in 1893. This has two reasons. Although the famous agreement of 1893 was the first international demarcation of the Thai-Lao border, it is not often emphasised in the historical literature that the agreement mapped the border along the Mekong River so that the province of Sayaboury officially belonged to Siam (formerly Thailand). It was only in 1904 that Siam ceded Sayaboury to France (the colonial power in Laos), creating an international borderline between Loei and Sayaboury. This would change again during the Second World War with Sayaboury being annexed by Thailand for a short time between 1941 and 1946.

As several studies suggest, however, these political shifts in power had little impact on the local population and everyday small-scale trading practices in my research area (Hafner 1983; Ducourtieux et al. 2005; Laffort and Dufumier 2006), at least much smaller effects than the changes that happened in and after 1975. According to my interlocutors, even the civil war in Laos from the 1950s that ended with the victory of the communist movement of the Pathet Lao in 1975 had little impact on everyday life along the border between Sayaboury and Loei. This was because Sayaboury province did not come under Pathet Lao control until the party’s victory. Instead, the mountains of Sayaboury province (less so the border area) became a site of anti-communist forces

while the border area became increasingly used as a route for cross-border logging and drug trading activities.

Another reason to capture the historical becomings of the border already before the first demarcation of the Thai-Lao border is because the making of the nation-state border was a gradual and often contested process that started long before the first international border agreement and that is still ongoing today. As I will demonstrate, the concept of the territorial border was nothing new to pre-colonial Southeast Asia, although it was applied merely at the local level rather than for the demarcation of larger polities.

Despite this, scholars working on Southeast Asia often describe the modern nation-state, its territorial borders, bureaucratic administration, and national identities as something imported and imposed by European colonialism, thereby disrupting the region’s

‘natural’ indigenous development (Reid 1993, 1997; Blussé and Gaastra 1998)⁸. The implication of this is to conceptualise Southeast Asian nation-states and their territorial borders as something sudden, something artificial to the region and its people, which denies Southeast Asians any agency as well as any ownership of their historical development and current situation. More recent scholars, however, have questioned such a narrative and instead focus on the contestedness, contingency, and discursiveness of colonialism in Southeast Asia (e.g. Day 2002; Hawkins 2007; Gainsborough 2007;

Walker 2008).

In line with these authors I highlight the contestations and negotiations that have taken place between foreign, indigenous, state, and non-state actors in the context of the Thai-Lao border rather than assuming a break in history at the onset of colonialism (and with the first border agreement) and its accompanying processes of territorialisation, state-making, and bordering. The same applies to the communist takeover in 1975, which marked a significant change in the manifestation of the border from my interlocutors’

point of view but which should equally not be seen as a break in history. As I will show in Chapter 2, trade continued despite and because of restrictions on cross-border trade, albeit in a different fashion than before. Since 1975 the nation-state border has been differently emphasised and enforced by different Thai and Lao governments, which has

8 Many scholars have argued that although Thailand was never colonised by external forces and remained politically independent, it was not free from Western influences and followed similar patterns as colonised countries. Some scholars have used the term ‘semi-coloniality’ to describe Thailand’s situation as politically independent but strongly influenced by the West, see especially Harrison and Jackson’s (2010) Traces of the Colonial in Thailand but also works by Thongchai Winichakul, Michael Herzfeld, and Hong Lysa.

had different effects on and responses by different actors on the ground. So although the historical trajectory produced in this chapter ends in the year 1975 (marking a rather literal break), it should not be seen as a point of complete discontinuation.

Although the chapter follows a chronological trajectory leading up to the year 1975, I seek to counter a teleological narrative that is dominated by state discourse. I do so by taking both written and oral accounts as well as state and non-state perspectives into consideration. Such an approach supports a conceptualisation of the border as historically contingent and as a multi-layered process that is constantly in flux. It also takes into consideration the multitude of actors that have been involved in processes of bordering, thereby supporting Hawkins when he calls for a more differentiated approach to the history of Southeast Asia, which: “must be seen as a historical matrix composed of millions of heterogeneous processes and historical actors responding to various stimuli in an attempt to manage order and the world as it occurs” (Hawkins 2007: 282).

When discussing the becomings of the border before 1975 I also engage with the nostalgia around the pre-1975 period that was particularly apparent in my interlocutors’

recalling of the past. Along with Pickering and Keightley, I define nostalgia as “a longing for what is lacking in a changed present…a yearning for what is now unattainable, simply because of the irreversibility of time” (2006: 920). That does not mean that nostalgia of the past emphasises a discontinuity between the past and the present but rather that it is a way of negotiating between the past and the present, between continuity and discontinuity (Atia and Davies 2010: 184).