Land and Loyalty: Security and the Development of Property Rights in Thailand

By Tomas Larsson

Domestic and international development strategies often focus on private ownership as a crucial anchor for long-term investment; the security of property rights provides a foundation for capitalist expansion. In recent years, Thailand's policies have been hailed as a prime example of how granting formal land rights to poor farmers in low-income countries can result in economic benefits. But the country provides a puzzle: Thailand faced major security threats from colonial powers in the nineteenth century and from communism in the twentieth century, yet only in the latter case did the government respond with pro-development tactics.

In Land and Loyalty, Tomas Larsson argues that institutional underdevelopment may prove, under certain circumstances, a strategic advantage rather than a weakness and that external threats play an important role in shaping the development of property regimes. Security concerns, he find, often guide economic policy. The domestic legacies, legal and socioeconomic, resulting from state responses to the outside world shape and limit the strategies available to politicians. While Larsson’s extensive archival research findings are drawn from Thai sources, he situates the experiences of Thailand in comparative perspective by contrasting them with the trajectory of property rights in Japan, Burma, and the Philippines.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9780801464553

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Land and Loyalty

Security and the Development of Property Rights in Thailand

Tomas Larsson

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

To my mother and father

Contents

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List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

1. Securitization and Institutional Development

2. Capitalizing Thailand

3. Weapon of a Weak State

4. Conserving Smallholder Society

5. Combating Specters and Communists

6. Old Solutions, New Challenges

Notes

Bibliography

Figures and Tables

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Figures

2.1. Poverty incidence, 1962–2002

2.2. Conceptual framework linking land rights, growth, and confict

2.3. Land sales and new mortgages registered in Thailand, 1955–2000

2.4. Agricultural credit from financial institutions

2.5. Fertilizer consumption in Thailand, 1961–2000

2.6. Per capita GDP in Thailand, 1820–2000

3.1. Map of central Siam and the twenty-four-hour zone

3.2. Government expenditure on land administration, 1904–5 to 1919–20

3.3. Government expenditure on land administration, as percentage of total, 1904–5 to 1919–20

3.4. Per capita GDP in Japan and Thailand, 1820–1940

4.1. Registered mortgage instruments for immovable property in Burma, 1910–51

5.1. Area under title in Thailand, 1955–2000

5.2. Clashes between insurgents and Thai security forces, 1965/66–85

5.3. Number of employees in the Department of Lands, 1955–2000

5.4. Phibun Songkhram officiates at title deed distribution ceremony, September 1953

5.5. Thailand’s Polity2 score, 1950–2000

5.6. A model of institutional change

5.7. Population-agricultural land ratios in Thailand and the Philippines, 1961–2001

Tables

2.1. Land ownership and entrepreneurship in Thailand, 1997

4.1. Socio-economic profile of rural Siam, 1929–30

4.2. Rural credit markets, 1933–34

5.1. Area of title deeds issued, by survey method

5.2. Numbers of provinces in which different types of survey were undertaken

Acknowledgments

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In my work on this book and the research on which it is based I have been supported by teachers, colleagues, friends, and family.

At Cornell University, I benefited from the tremendous intellectual generosity of Jonas Pontusson, Ronald Herring, Peter Katzenstein, Victor Nee, and Thak Chaloemtiarana. I was also fortunate to be able to learn about the making of states, nations, and markets in seminars led by Benedict Anderson, Richard Bensel, and Valerie Bunce.

In Bangkok, where most of the research for this book was done, I especially thank Charles Mehl and Tongroj Onchan at the Mekong Environment and Resource Institute for all their help and advice. They, together with Orapan Nabangchang, Thippawal Srijantr, Eathipol Srisawaluck, and Anthony Zola, introduced me to the often mind-boggling intricacies of land tenure reform in Thailand. The National Research Council of Thailand facilitated my research at the National Archives, the Council of State, and the Department of Lands (DOL). At the DOL, I am particularly thankful for the help extended to me by Wanna Rakyao and Ratchanee Dungchim.

The staff at the National Archives in Bangkok and London kindly and efficiently helped me locate many of the historical documents on which my argument rests.

As a visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore I was provided with the time and a congenial environment which enabled me to work on the book manuscript. My employers at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, and St John’s College generously granted me leave so that I could spend a full year away from my teaching responsibilities.

My argument has been sharpened thanks to questions and comments from participants in seminars and workshops at Cornell University, UC-Riverside, UC-Berkeley, Northern Illinois University, Oxford University, the University of Cambridge, and Växjö University.

At various stages in the writing process, including some early drafts, my argument has benefited from the comments and criticisms of Patrik Aspers, David Biggs, the late Nigel Brailey, Richard Doner, Stephan Haggard, Derek Hall, Ian Harris, Staffan Lindberg, Tamara Loos, Michelle Tan, Emil Uddhammar, Peter Vandergeest, Andrew Walker, and James Warren. Two anonymous reviewers for Cornell University Press and its editor Roger Haydon provided insightful critiques of the first full draft of the book manuscript. Gavin Lewis expertly copyedited the final manuscript.

Sections of this book draw on previously published material. I acknowledge Elsevier for permission to reprint portions of Intertextual Relations: The Geopolitics of Land Rights in Thailand, Political Geography 26, no. 7 (2007), and Lynne Rienner Publishers for permission to reprint portions of Western Imperialism and Defensive Underdevelopment of Property Rights Institutions in Siam, Journal of East Asian Studies 8, no. 1 (2008).

My research was made possible through financial support from the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation, Stockholm, and the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.

My wonderful friends and family have made sure that the long periods I have been engrossed in the writing of this book have been subject to frequent and pleasant interruptions. For this I owe a special thanks to my wife, Chanita, and to our lovely daughters, Martina and Carolina.

1

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SECURITIZATION AND INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

What are the causes of economic development? Increasingly, scholars of political economy answer institutions in general and property rights institutions in particular. As Matthew Lange argues, the protection of property rights is quite possibly the most basic type of social regulation necessary for market production and expansion (2005, 58). Emphasizing the importance of private property, prominent economists have defined a good institution as "a social organization that ensures that a broad cross-section of the society has effective property rights (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2003, 86, emphasis in original). While the notion is not entirely novel, the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto (2000) has popularized the idea that the transformation of informal into formal property rights provides the key to economic prosperity, precisely because this is what makes property rights effective. This understanding of the importance of formality has in recent years been manifested in rule of law" initiatives by national governments and international development agencies alike. It has also found an institutional home in a High Level Commission for the Legal Empowerment of the Poor, launched in 2006 and co-chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Hernando de Soto. That formal property rights institutions matter—perhaps particularly for the poor—is a powerful idea.¹ But what are the political and historical origins of such institutions? It is this question that this book addresses.

The degree to which states are exposed to international competition is an important part of explanations for the emergence of more efficient property rights structures enforced by the state. As Douglass North has noted, Relatively inefficient property rights threaten the survival of a state in the context of more efficient neighbors, and the ruler faces the choice of extinction or of modifying the fundamental ownership structure to enable the society to reduce transaction costs and raise the rate of growth (1981, 29).²

While the intuitions behind this line of argument were developed in the context of Europe’s historical experience—with its strong links between war-making, state-building, and commerce (Tilly 1990)—East and Southeast Asia offer a more recent example of how an intensely competitive regional security environment can motivate state elites to create strong states and pursue economic growth-enhancing and welfare-promoting policies (Stubbs 1999, 2005; Zhu 2000; Kang 1995, 2002, 29–40; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006; Doner, Ritchie, and Slater 2005; Campos and Root 1996; Woo-Cumings 1998).

In other parts of the world, less developmentally positive logics of state formation have prevailed, not necessarily because there has been an absence of war or threats thereof. For postcolonial Africa, respect for the sovereignty norm is often identified as an important explanation for the survival of weak and developmentally ineffective states (Jackson and Rosberg 1982; Jackson 1990). In a more competitive geopolitical context, such states would have been swallowed up by stronger rivals (Herbst 1990). But this Darwinian logic does not necessarily apply even in regions that, like East and Southeast Asia, have seen intense and persistent geopolitical rivalries. Although postindependence Middle Eastern states have focused great energies on preparing for and engaging in war, the developmental impact of such efforts has been limited, mainly because extractive efforts have been directed toward external sources of revenues, whether in the form of natural resource rents (oil) or foreign military assistance from wealthy allies (Heydemann 2000; Lustick 1997; Barnett 1992). Wars do not necessarily make states, even if geopolitics "influence the probabilities of changes in property rights" (Campbell and Lindberg 1990, 644).

The apparently indeterminate effects of external security threats on state formation have generally been addressed by making the models more elaborate: by adding explanatory variables that specify the conditions under which states will be induced to build state capacity (Doner, Ritchie, and Slater 2005; Thies 2004). In doing so, much of the literature that emphasizes the role of external and internal security threats in accounting for economic and political outcomes of various kinds treats threats as if they were objective and state responses as if they were the only rational ones given the circumstances.

I take a different approach. Most threats to security are not self-evident, and neither are the policies and institutions that will counter them most effectively and efficiently (Widmaier, Blyth, and Seabrooke 2007). State elites are susceptible to misperception, myopia, myth-making, and hysteria (Jervis 1976; Mueller 2005; Van Evera 2003; Snyder 1991, 31–55). Uncertainty and indeterminacy is also a consequence of the fact that security remains an ambiguous symbol (Wolfers 1965, chap. 10) and an insufficiently explicated concept (Baldwin 1997, 24) not only for scholars but also for statesmen. Furthermore, the capacity of humans to anticipate the future, and their desire to shape it, means that political action is often prophylactic and, as such, motivated not so much by unmediated, imminent existential threats as by (perhaps unjustified) fears about the future. Policy formulation in the face of security threats therefore tends to proceed by way of a particular form of counterfactual reasoning: We’d be sorry if we didn’t. When to act and what to do is therefore never directly determined by the objective level of external security threats arrayed against a state, but rather by such factors as the threat perception and risk aversion of the actors, their beliefs about what policy responses are likely to be efficacious, and their assessment of domestic political consequences.

Using a minimal conception, security often refers to two core values: state sovereignty and territorial integrity. But even these values are not necessarily held equally dear in all times and all places—such as premodern Southeast Asia—but rather constitute the core values of the classic Westphalian state. Using a wider definition of security, in the interest of portability across contexts, security threats are here understood as referring to events and phenomena that political actors intersubjectively interpret as necessitating change in order to protect cherished values and identities. In this book the main focus is on security threats that are perceived as fundamentally external in origin—although these may also be associated with internal, Quisling-like dimensions.

Securitization as a Causal Mechanism

How, then, to understand the role of security threats as a cause of institutional change? The mechanismic turn in social science may offer a way forward. While the conception of causal mechanism is a contested one, a baseline definition states that a causal mechanism is the pathway or process by which an effect is produced or a purpose is accomplished (Gerring 2008, 178). Instead of thinking of external security threats as (simply) an independent variable, we can conceptualize security threats as elements of a causal mechanism—securitization.

I conceive of securitization as an argumentative process that connects the perception of a threat with the formulation and implementation of policy that is intended to alleviate the threat (Balzacq 2009, 2011; Guzzini 2011). Securitization involves an agent that identifies a threat against something regarded as a fundamental value. In this book, the state is the securitizing agent, and the two most important referent objects of securitization are the state itself and the society over which it seeks to rule, with sovereignty and (national) identity, respectively, as the currencies in which security is measured (Waever 1995). The process of securitization furthermore involves an articulation of causal beliefs that motivate choices of policy instruments (Goldstein and Keohane 1993).

In contrast with the so-called Copenhagen School’s understanding of securitization as (just) a speech act (Waever 1995; Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998), securitization when conceived as a causal mechanism therefore requires that a securitizing rhetorical move is followed by actual security practice (Floyd 2010, 54).³ Our attention is thus shifted away from (mere) discourse towards the actual policy instruments that states use to deal with dangers (Balzacq 2008). These policy instruments may be of a traditional military variety, or they may be categorized as economic, political, social, cultural, environmental, etc.

The choice of policy instruments are determined by causal beliefs. State officials in different countries frequently hold different beliefs about how particular policies may enhance security. For example, Centeno (1997) shows that Latin American leaders in the nineteenth century viewed borrowing money abroad and printing money as policies that could finance preparation for and engagement in war. In Siam, similar policies were viewed, perhaps not unrealistically, as a certain road to ruin.⁴

In this book the focus is on the property rights regime and policies relating thereto. There is nothing inherent in such policies that make them causally related to security, however that is conceived. But political actors can make the argumentative link between threats and policies (securitization). They can also sever established connections between threats and policies (desecuritization). Or property rights policies may not be regarded as relevant to questions of security at all. However, although issues and policy instruments that state elites regard as having a direct bearing on matters of national security are highly variable (Katzenstein 1996, 10), the property rights regime is likely to be viewed by public officials at least in part through the lens of security. This is particularly true if security is conceived in the broader sense of the stability of the overarching political order.

Given the substantive focus of this book, securitization as a causal mechanism builds bridges between usually quite separate political realms. The first is the high politics of international diplomacy and national security. The second is the usually low politics of cadastral surveys, land-titling schemes, and agricultural finance.⁵ In my argument these two spheres are closely intertwined. Herring (1983, 4) has emphasized the significance of the perceptual model of elites of the rural world: the prevailing understanding of what is wrong, what is possible, what will work. The argument here is that what appears to be wrong, to be possible, and to be workable in relation to the rural world is critically shaped by understandings of what is possible and workable in terms of the wider geopolitical context. This is particularly true in periods when, as has frequently been the case, property rights institutions serve as critical benchmarks of civilization and hallmarks of rival ideological camps in world politics.

Securitization is a causal mechanism which, following Elster’s conception, is frequently occurring and easily recognizable but with unknown triggers and indeterminate consequences (1998, 45). Securitization can therefore cause a wide range of outcomes, depending on how threats are linked to policies. At one extreme, securitization can lead to the deliberate construction of a thriving agricultural economy, as was the case with the South Korean and Taiwanese land reforms: these were counterrevolutionary responses to the communist challenges emanating from China and North Korea (Tai 1974), which subsequently provided the economic basis for the construction of successful developmental states (Grabowski 1994).⁶ On the other hand, securitization can cause state leaders to intentionally impoverish their societies. Such was the case in the Southeast Asian archipelago in the seventeenth century, where rulers such as the sultan of Magindanao (in what is today the Philippines) suddenly decided to ban the cultivation of valuable spice crops—pepper, cloves, nutmeg—in order to avoid war with violently monopoly-seeking European powers, most notably in the form of the Dutch East India Company (Reid 1993, 299–300). Another illustrative example is provided by the contrasting approaches that the military juntas in Bangkok and Rangoon adopted in the early 1960s in order to secure themselves against the threat of communism. In Bangkok, the generals lurched rightward, embracing the principles of private property and capitalism while mobilizing traditional legitimating symbols such as the monarchy and the monkhood (Thak 2007 [1979]; Suehiro 1996). In Rangoon, in contrast, General Ne Win embarked on the Burmese Road to Socialism—including the nationalization of land—in order to win the hearts and minds of the rural population and to reduce the military threat posed by Mao’s China (Callahan 2003, 209). Burmese state elites essentially sought to preempt a communist takeover by joining the fraternity of socialist states.

In these examples, the causal mechanism—securitization—is the same, but the policies adopted vary greatly, as do the consequences for long-term economic and political development. Thus, while we can make a reasonably strong argument that security threats have a significant impact on property rights regimes, we cannot necessarily make predictions of how they do so. As Tilly argues (1995, 1601), regularities in political life…consist of recurrent causes which in different circumstances and sequences compound into highly variable but nonetheless explicable effects. Securitization is one such recurrent cause.

Context Is (Almost) Everything

Why do outcomes vary even though the mechanism is the same? The answer is that the contexts are different. In order to explain outcomes, social scientists are increasingly focusing their attention on the interaction between causal mechanisms and the context in which they operate. This, according to Falleti and Lynch (2009), is the only way that causal explanations can be rendered credible. But since context is endless, while the scholar’s life is short, we must focus our attention on the most critical aspects of the context. Here I have generally been guided by existing theories about security threats and state formation and the concept of property itself.

History can be divided into periods depending on the character of the international system and the overarching patterns of rivalry in world politics. The era of colonial expansion in Southeast Asia can thus be treated as analytically nonequivalent to the Cold War era of decolonization. These are different contexts, the perceived threats are different, and we would not necessarily expect causal mechanisms to operate in the same way in both time periods.

Sequencing is another important temporal dimension of the context (Pierson 2004, chap. 2). In what order things happen can determine whether or how securitization operates. This is an argument that I develop most explicitly in chapter 3, through a comparison of Siam and Japan (see also Larsson 2008). But throughout the book there is also another way in which sequencing matters. How securitization operated at more or less critical historical junctures affects how it operates in subsequent episodes. In this case, the choices that rulers make regarding property rights policies—if and how to securitize—not only limit future options, they may also precipitate later crises, structure available options, and shape the choices made at those junctures (Haydu 1998, 353; see also Haydu 2010). We should expect this to be true of many different kinds of policies, but particularly so of those that relate to property rights. This is because property rights institutions are characterized by powerful feedback mechanisms. How property rights are securitized can therefore affect resource allocation, wealth accumulation, and power relations within (and, indeed, between) countries. By manipulating property rights, usually in periods of crisis, state actors can alter the organization of the economy and thereby give rise to entirely new interest groups in society (Campbell and Lindberg 1990, 635). In this sense, policy produces politics.

Another guide to relevant aspects of the context is provided by recognition of the multidimensional nature of property rights. Property rights in land are often conceptualized as a bundle of rights which may include different combinations of the rights to use, abuse, exclude others, inherit, give away, rent out, lease, sell, buy, mortgage, tax, expropriate, and so forth. Over a single plot of land many different persons and juridical entities may hold different bundles of rights. These may, furthermore, vary from field to field and from village to village. The process of formalization is intended, in part, to standardize the bundles of rights that landowners enjoy—to make society more legible and thereby provide the institutional underpinnings for an integrated national market (Polanyi 1957 [1944]; Scott 1998).

To complicate things further, the authority to redefine these property rights bundles may reside in different social and political organizations and institutions, at different levels of the polity. As I have argued elsewhere, property rights in land are regulated at different legal-geographic scales (Larsson 2007a). Here it is useful to think of these scales as institutional layers (Falleti and Lynch 2009), with different property rights regulations located at the international, national, and local levels. Examples include property-related provisions in international treaties, formal land law issued by national governments, and informal, customary land rights.

How land rights are regulated in terms of these different dimensions or layers constitutes aspects of the context that can affect how securitization operates.

In addition, fundamental transformations of the state delineate critical changes in the context (Falleti and Lynch 2009, 1160). We would not, for example, expect the mechanism of securitization to operate in the same way in nonbureaucratic states as it does in bureaucratic states (Centeno 1997). Another powerful illustration can be found in the spread of nationalism and the resulting nationalization of (state) interests and security (Anderson 1991; Meyer et al. 1997; Abdelal 2001; Helleiner and Pickel 2005). In the period covered by this book, Thailand undergoes precisely such a fundamental transformation with attendant consequences for how securitization operates. In the mid-nineteenth century, Siam was a dynastic state enmeshed in a hierarchical regional order with (a rapidly declining) China at the apex and a plethora of minor principalities at the bottom (Thongchai 1994; Sarasin 1977). It was not considered civilized and as such was not allowed full membership of the Eurocentric international society of states (Gong 1984). A hundred and twenty or so years later, Siam had been transformed into one sovereign state (and constitutional monarchy) amongst all the others (Jackson 1990; Bull and Watson 1984). Such fundamental transformations of states are frequently followed by shifts in how the securitization mechanism operates, not least by creating new values and identities that can be threatened.

Geography is another important aspect of the context. The geographic location of states affects how public officials perceive and respond to security threats. Stubbs (2005), for instance, makes a powerful argument for the significance of geographic location in the Cold War as an explanation for divergent patterns of institutional and economic development. A country’s location can be more or less insecure.

As a final note on the question of mechanisms and contexts, I should make clear that although this book focuses squarely on a single mechanism—securitization—it does so on the basis of a firm belief that it provides a powerful explanation for the trajectory of institutional development in Thailand. It is not based on an assumption that securitization will always be the most relevant causal mechanism when we seek to explain how property rights evolve. Nor is it assumed that securitization is the only relevant causal mechanism even in the case of Thailand. Other mechanisms are surely at work. But in the interest of making the argument and the presentation as clear as possible, I have sought to avoid the proliferation of mechanisms that characterizes parts of the mechanism-enthusiastic literature. The analytical attention is therefore squarely focused on securitization and the context within which it operates.

The Question

Thailand has since the 1990s been portrayed as a paradigmatic example of the benefits—in terms of economic growth and poverty alleviation—of providing the rural poor with formal land rights (World Bank 1997, 44, 2004, 80–83; Phillips 2006, 49; de Soto 2000, 169; Slater 2002; Bledsoe 2006, 152, 155, 172; Burns 2007). Research into the economic consequences of a twenty-year land-titling program, launched in 1984, has provided some of the strongest evidence for the positive effects—in terms of access to capital, investment, productivity, and income—that result when a state defines and enforces property rights in land in such a way that uncertainty and transaction costs are reduced (see Feder and Tongroj 1987; Feder et al. 1988; Department of Lands 2002). These reforms have contributed to an impressive record of economic growth: Thailand is one of only thirteen countries that have achieved high, sustained growth in the postwar period (Commission on Growth and Development 2008, 19).⁷

Today, Thailand’s centralized land administration system is notable for the speed with which transactions involving formal land holdings can be completed—the time required to close officially a real estate transaction at the Department of Lands averages two and a half hours (Brits, Grant, and Burns 2002, 11). The regulatory costs and requirements associated with land transactions are extremely low in international comparison: Thailand placed fifth out of 181 countries in the registering property category of the World Bank’s 2009 Ease of Doing Business ranking. In comparison, Malaysia ranked 81st, the Philippines 97th, and Indonesia 107th (World Bank 2008). Thailand therefore stands out as something of an exception in a region otherwise characterized by the paucity of formal, effective, and nationally integrated tenure systems (Hall 2004, 409).⁸ Indeed, the Thai land-titling bureaucracy’s aim is to provide full title for all land that can be titled, a degree of investment in the official specification of private property rights in land unheard-of in most countries, and certainly without precedent in the Anglo-Saxon capitalist economies that are frequently identified as the archetypical sources of inspiration for promarket institutional reforms in the developing world (Evans 2004).

Many similar reforms have floundered elsewhere (Platteau 1996; Jansen and Roquas 1998; Zoomers and Haar 2000; Lund 2001; Wachter and English 1992; Economist 2006a, 2006b; Onoma 2010). As a consequence, Thailand has served as a model for land formalization programs throughout the developing world (Hall, Hirsch, and Li 2011, 35). However, the existing literature is almost completely silent on the history and politics of land titling in Thailand, and it is this lacuna that this book seeks to fill. The question is not why formalization of land rights was associated with good developmental outcomes. Of that we have a fairly good understanding. What puzzled me was why it had been possible to dramatically improve property rights institutions in Thailand.

Substantive significance aside, my curiosity was further stimulated by the cognitive dissonance that arose in confrontation with the image, predominant in the scholarly literature, of the Thai state as one in which patrimonialism and predation have flourished (Christensen et al. 1993; Hutchcroft 1999; MacIntyre 2003; Doner and Ramsay 2000; Haggard 2000; Riggs 1966). More recently, Doner (2009, 140) and Slater (2010, 8 n. 19) have argued that the Thai state has seen no meaningful increase in its institutional capacities in