In an escalation that shocked even seasoned observers of Southeast Asian politics, Thailand and Cambodia went to war last month. Dozens were killed, hundreds of thousands displaced. The violence ranged from infantry firefights to artillery and rocket barrages that struck civilian centers. Even jet fighters that had never been used before in actual combat were deployed.
For what? A border temple, centuries-old ruins, and vague claims of cultural pride. Yet to treat this war as an irrational spasm or a misunderstanding would be to miss the point: this was not a conflict over ancient stones, but the consequence of elite manipulation of nationalist myths for political survival.
The Thai and Cambodian ruling classes, both facing domestic crises of legitimacy, turned to the old standby, nationalism, to consolidate support and distract from their failures. The nationalist turn is not a new tactic in Southeast Asia. It is a legacy of empire, colonialism, and the modern state’s attempts to define itself against the “other” — in this case, to be found across a border drawn by French imperialists.
While we might perceive Cambodia as a small, impoverished country today, a thousand years ago, it was at the center of the vast Khmer Empire (802–1431), a polity larger than the Byzantine Empire. At its height, the empire ruled over what is now Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, southern Vietnam, and parts of Myanmar and Malaysia. Its capital, Angkor, housed up to a million people and boasted some of the world’s most stunning architecture — Angkor Wat, the Bayon, Banteay Srei — religious monuments on a scale unmatched anywhere.
The Khmer Empire followed the mandala model of statecraft — decentralized and flexible, with fluid borders and shifting alliances. In early modern Southeast Asia, the system’s vague boundaries helped to avoid conflicts between the centralized monarchies. But the colonial era forcibly converted these grey zones of influence into fixed frontiers, a transformation that would prove explosive in the modern era.
By the fifteenth century, the Khmer Empire was in decline. Its neighbors, Siam (Ayutthaya) from the west and Đại Việt from the east, rose in power. Siam sacked Angkor in 1431 and absorbed many aspects of Khmer governance and aesthetics into its own culture.
Ironically, what we now consider “Thai” — court rituals, architecture, even Muay Thai — owes much to Khmer origins. In 2023, when host-country Cambodia labeled the kickboxing competition “Kun Khmer” during the Southeast Asian Games, Thailand boycotted the event in protest.
While never completely abandoned, the vast majority of Angkorian temples fell into disuse. Western Cambodia, including the temple complex, came under Siamese rule. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese kingdom seized the Mekong Delta and Vietnamese settlers moved up the river. Cambodia became a geopolitical football, its royal court manipulated by both neighbors. In 1834, Vietnam annexed most of Cambodia. A Khmer uprising failed, and only in 1847 did the kingdom regain independence.
For ordinary people, none of this was about national identity. It was about survival and resisting strange soldiers who occupied their villages. The concept of being “Khmer” or “Thai” in the modern nationalist sense had no meaning. That changed in the nineteenth century, when European colonialism intervened.
The French seized southern Vietnam in the mid-nineteenth century and eyed Cambodia as a strategic asset. Ignorant of Asian geography, French imperialists hoped the Mekong would serve as a backdoor to China. King Norodom accepted French protection in 1863, hoping it would shield him from Siam and Vietnam.
Cambodia quickly became a colonial backwater. The Mekong proved useless as a trade route to China (one wonders why they did not ask the locals about the feasibility of navigating the great river). The French poured little investment into infrastructure or education, instead importing Vietnamese civil servants to staff the administration, fostering Khmer resentment.
Yet the French were heavily invested in defining Khmer identity — not out of respect but as a strategy to buffer Cambodia from Thai influence. In her work Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, historian Penny Edwards shows how French archaeologists and colonial scholars worked to reconstruct the idea of “Khmerness” through monuments, language, and Buddhism. The goal was to isolate Cambodian identity from Thai and Vietnamese alternatives, reinforcing French colonial control.
In 1907, France pressured Siam to return three western provinces to Cambodia, including Preah Vihear. These borders, drawn through the Franco–Siamese treaties of 1904 and 1907, would later lead to war.
Thailand (then Siam) never fell under European colonial rule, in part because it adapted to the rules of empire. Under Kings Mongkut and Chulalongkorn, Siam embarked on “defensive modernization.” Railways, schools, and centralized bureaucracy transformed the kingdom into a modern state.
Central to this was nationalism. In Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation, historian and onetime political prisoner Thongchai Winichakul describes how Siam’s elite imagined the kingdom as a territorialized and sovereign entity and elevated central Thai culture as the national standard. Ethnic minorities — Khmer, Lao, Malay, and Chinese — were subject to forced assimilation. In the twentieth century, “Thai” was no longer a cultural identity but a political project.
In 1914, King Vajiravudh published a notorious Sinophobic essay titled “The Jews of the East.” Ethnic minorities such as urban Chinese, Lao, and Khmer in the northeast, Muslim Malay to the south, and other highland people in the northwest have endured various iterations of Thaification policies for the past century.
The fascist prime minister field marshall Plaek Phibunsongkhram accelerated this project. In 1939, he renamed the country “Thailand” and launched ultranationalist campaigns. His government promoted slogans like “nation, religion, and king” while denigrating minorities.
This far-right nationalism ensured that Thailand would be a close US ally during the Cold War. It offered airbases for American bombers heading to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, not to mention beach resorts for American troops on rest and recreation leave. Foreign Minister Thanat Khoman even served as Grand Marshall of the Tournament of Roses in 1968, the only Asian to do so in its 135-year history.
Military coups have punctuated Thai politics ever since. Despite near-constant upheaval, all factions — monarchist, military, and civilian — have fallen back on nationalism to secure power. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Thailand has experienced at least two dozen coups since 1932.
After Cambodia’s independence in 1953, Thailand challenged the status of Preah Vihear, arguing that the 1907 map that placed the temple in Cambodia was invalid. In 1962, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in Cambodia’s favor. Thailand never accepted the decision.
The issue faded as Cambodia plunged into the chaos of civil war (1967–75) and the murderous Khmer Rouge regime (1975–79), and the borderlands filled with refugee camps during Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia (1979–89). However, the underlying tension never disappeared. In 2008, Cambodia successfully registered Preah Vihear as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Thai nationalist groups accused their government of surrendering national pride and occupied nearby borderlands. Armed clashes followed.
Cambodia returned to the ICJ, which reaffirmed in 2013 that not only the temple but also the surrounding area belonged to Cambodia. Still, Thai soldiers remained deployed near the site. Other disputed Khmer temples like Prasat Ta Muen Thom and Prasat Ta Krabey also became flash points. A decade-long lull ended in 2025, with border skirmishes escalating into the worst violence yet.
This dispute is not just about land. It is about cultural ownership, nationalist myths, and unresolved colonial legacies. Pointing to geographic realities, Thailand argues that Preah Vihear is more accessible from its side, ignoring the ICJ’s ruling. Upholding deep historical legacies, Cambodia claims rightful succession to the Khmer Empire and sees any challenge to temple sovereignty as existential.
At the heart of the dispute lies the imperial cartography of France. The 1904–7 treaties stated that the border should follow the watershed of the Dangrek Mountains. But French surveyors drew maps that placed Preah Vihear in Cambodia.
Thailand claims it never agreed to these maps. The ICJ rejected that argument in 1962, pointing out that Thailand had never protested their use during the colonial period. Indeed, the kingdom was one of the few places in the world to escape European colonialism because the monarchy was willing to cede border lands to the British and French imperial projects.
Turning to the idyllic coastline and islands, the maritime dimension is just as fraught. Both countries claim overlapping offshore zones: Cambodia filed a claim in 1972, Thailand in 1973. A 2001 memorandum of understanding proposed joint development, but it collapsed amid political instability. Much like the land borders, these maritime claims are another colonial-era hangover.
So why did we see a dramatic escalation now in 2025? The answer lies not in the past but in the political present. In Thailand, the conservative royalist-military bloc remains fragile. Pro-democracy protests continue to challenge entrenched power structures.
In Cambodia, Prime Minister Hun Manet has inherited the deeply authoritarian system of his father, Hun Sen, rife with land grabs, crony capitalism, and repression. The fact that the elderly Hun Sen clearly remains in charge of important decisions undermines the new leader’s credibility. Neither regime has legitimacy. Nationalism offers a useful escape.
The temple war is less about history than it is about political crisis. It is about elites in Bangkok and Phnom Penh weaponizing myth to distract from corruption, inequality, and repression. When legitimacy falters, they invoke the flag, the border, and the ruins. The bloodshed has bolstered both regimes. Political scientist Paul Chambers has shown that in Bangkok, the military is using the crisis to solidify its power against civilian rule.
As Benedict Anderson reminded us, nations are imagined communities. But that process of imagination is not benign. In postcolonial Southeast Asia, it has often been a tool of domination, not liberation. The line between cultural pride and chauvinist violence is thin.
The people who pay the price for crossing it are the rural poor, not the generals, oligarchs, or bureaucrats who send them to die. This is not a conflict over a temple. It is a fight over power, memory, and who gets to define the nation.
Great Job Michael G. Vann & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
