6 - Conclusion: A Rickety Reinvention

Summary

This concluding chapter seeks to answer the question posed at the beginning of this book: Did Thaksin successfully construct a post-Cold War foreign policy strategy? If yes, was it effective? And how did it shape the face of Thai diplomacy? The Thaksin period was one of the most intense periods of Thai diplomacy. Thaksin and his foreign ministers embarked on revolutionizing the way Thai diplomacy was conducted, and changed habits of past centuries and the content of the country's traditional foreign policy. A sea change in Thai foreign policy coincided with the shift in the role of the Thai Foreign Ministry. In many ways, the less autonomous Foreign Ministry should be held up as a positive model in any thriving democratic society. Thaksin thus questioned why Thai foreign policy should be the rightful purview of bureaucrats. His perspective of foreign policy was a “twin brother” to his domestic policy. Thaksin's self-styled diplomacy was proactive, aggressive and confident. It contained a sense of nationalism – practising diplomacy supposedly for the interests of the Thais. Also known as populist diplomacy, Thaksin claimed to place people at the core of his foreign policy. His strategy was two-fold: adopting a nationalistic foreign policy and raising the country's international profile. But critics saw this as a collision between the nationalist and internationalist approaches. Such a collision caused confusion among Thailand's neighbours. More importantly, Thaksin's assertive diplomacy occasionally came across as self-serving: promoting personal economic interests and domestic political gains. This generated a negative impact on his regional leadership aims.

Foreign Minister Surakiart rationalized that at the beginning of the millennium, the global political and economic landscape had changed tremendously and that it was necessary for Thailand to fine-tune its foreign policy orientation accordingly. One of the foreign policy initiatives was to urgently narrow the gap between the more and less economically developed states in the region.