In contrast to the evolvement of neighboring Thailand and in spite of the fact that it was able to quadruple itself in size within a number of years, the Laotian state is in the minds of most historians a definite “construct of the moderm period" (See Jerndal, Randi, Rigg, Jonathan. "Making Space in Laos: Constructing a National Identity in a 'Forgotten' Country", Political Geography 17, no. 7 (1998): 809-31.) In fact Laos grew out of the colonial ambitions of French commanders who wished to cement their hold over land holdings on the northeast bank of the Mekong by incorporating it as a distinct territory (For a detailed description se Evans, Grant. Laos: Culture and Society. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Press, 1999.) Thus Laos might best be described as a quasi-nation, having emerged from maps drawn by European colonists rather than from a sense of territory and nationhood among united people.It would nevertheless be unfair to conclude that the Lao People's Democratic Republic is something "less than a state" for having arisen this way, when, within the "family of nations", one might question how many of ten members of ASEAN, or for that matter, the 192 members of the United Nations, would actually qualify for inclusion if string rules where applied. Furthermore, the notion of a nation composed of "majority" and "minority" groups is itself a bit of a misnomer especially in the context of Laos, a state in which the dominant pseudonymous group comprises no more than forty-five per cent of the total population (for details again see Evans 1999). Indeed, since the overthrow of the royalists in 1975, the Laotian Government has rejected the use of terms like "majority," "minority," and "indigenous"in spite of the Hmong indeed being a majority group. This process of ironing out varieties and language differences, has been detailed in Ovesen, Jan, Trankell, lng-Britt. " Cambodia", in Ethnicity in Asia, edited by Colin Mackerras. New York: Routledge-Curzon, 2003.
In fact French efforts to create a national culture in Laos never extended significantly beyond the lowland populations. The highland peoples remained, for the most part, invisible and irrelevant. In spite of this, the Hmong, an upland group from southern China whose arrival in Southeast Asia only slightly predated that of the French, nevertheless achieved a prominent position in the regional set-up. This was largely due to the centrality the of opium trade to the colony's finances plus the demonstrated willingness of the Hmong to prosecute their interests to the point of armed rebellion if need be. Thus the French colonial officials not only engaged in direct negotiations with the Hmong (rather than working through Lao meaning ‘Thai’-speaking, intermediaries) and eventually also granted them a near-autonomous status within the colony, freeing them from taxation and oversight by lowland overseers. In this sense, the Hmong were arguably the first people in Laos to enjoy a form of self-government defined along ethno national principles, though these institutions were still contained within the larger governmental structures of French Indochina. Most of the languages of mainland Southeast Asia belong to several large families or groupings, including Tibeto-Burmese, Mon-Khmer, Tai-Kadai, and Vietnamese-Muong. The languages of insular Southeast Asia (along with some of those of the mainland) all belong to the great Austronesian family, which, though spread throughout most of the Pacific Islands, is also of Asian origin.
Folowing the hostilities during World War II, the peoples of Laos more or less fell back into many of the patterns which had characterized their lives in the pre-colonial era. Political and social relations became far more parochial again, and there only the colonial legacy of territorial boundaries and the externally acknowledged sovereignty of the Lao monarch based in Luang Prabang kept the polity from dissolving back into a fragmentary state. However, this interstice of apparent inactivity provided the opportunity for the growth of a new nationalist movement informed not only by the experience of French colonization but also the spread of communism through the region
The vanguards of this ideology among the Laotians, the Pathet Lao, had both practical and ideological reasons for extending their campaign to the uplands, where local inhabitants who had been (re- )defined as kha by the royalists. In moving their campaign into the hills, however, the revolutionaries were forced to confront the ethnic heterogeneity of Laotian society in a manner that prior regimes never had, and the nationalist rhetoric which emerged from the conflict (in which the Pathet Lao ultimately prevailed) was one of inclusion and ethnic balance.
This rhetoric notwithstanding, there have been, and remain, many aspects of the post-communist nation-building project in Laos (a project still very much in progress) that brand it as a "Lao" rather than "Laotian" campaign. Not only is the Lao language the only official language and Lao script the official script (and only language which the government has invested resources to standardize), but Buddhism, a religion practiced almost exclusively by lowland Lao (Lao Loum) is the state religion and Lao dress and customs are promoted in the national curriculum. Likely more troubling than these symbols of Lao cultural hegemony for most Lao Theung and Lao Sung citizens, however, are the more concrete manifestations of a lowland bias in terms of the way that state development programmes are managed and state resources distributed. The Lao Government, operating within the constraints imposed by the lowest GDP per capita of any country in Southeast Asia, has left many aspects of infrastructural development to the respective provinces which, in turn, have generally opted to create road systems which linked established population centers to international markets, thus by-passing the significant portion of the population (particularly upland peoples) who reside in sparsely populated areas and/or have few resources of value to trade internationally (Jerndal and Rigg 1999). Service delivery, in turn, tends to be confined to the more accessible regions of the country, meaning that those cut off from the highway infrastructure are also deprived of educational and medical services and other social benefits. They are effectively excluded from participation in the larger economy and society and, not surprisingly, have tended to express their frustrations through participation in vigilante activity such as the hijacking of vehicles travelling on roads traversing remote areas.
With the relaxation of communist strictures on trade and the expansion of cross-border trade throughout the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS), in which Laos occupies a central position, the road system in Laos has been extended and the access to markets and the consumer goods they offer extended to an ever wider share of Laotian society. But to enjoy the benefits of these improvements, members of traditionally upland-dwellig groups are frequently forced to relocate to lowland lowland areas, a move which comes at comes at substantial physical, psychological and cultural costs, as Lyttleton (2005) has documented. The upland of Laos are thus increasingly faced with a dilemma, whether to become more completely "Lao", meaning to move down from their high altitude communities, take up social and agricultural practices characteristic of their lowland neighbours and, by doing so, reap the benefits of increased access to schools, healthcare, consumer goods and labour markets, or to remain in their traditional enclave communities in the hills where their relative disadvantage is likely to become more pronounced but their cultural and social distinctiveness may remain intact. Whatever their choices as individuals and collectively as a community, the Laos of the future seems likely - whatever the rhetorical position of government authorities on ethnic diversity - to be a country based on a narrower range of ethnic expression integrated more tightly into a national and international community.
And turning now to Thailand where we started this article; with the close of World War II and more significantly the eruption of the violence which accompanied the withdrawal of occupying troops from both Burma and French Indochina, the Thai state's view of the uplands and its people changed markedly. In the name of national security and on the advice of the American military, the Thai Government moved decisively to secure its borders to prevent communist insurgents from infiltrating the kingdom. Particularly targeted by the government's security measures were groups residing near the country's periphery, in particular the Thai-Lao farmers of the Northeast and the "migratory" hill tribes of the Northern uplands. I I While both were subjected to military intervention (Brown 1994), the hill tribes were particularly targeted in a two-pronged effort in which the Royal Thai Army and Border Police were sent in to secure the border, thus sealing off a significant avenue of social and economic contact for the upland groups, while the Forestry Department and the Ministry of the Interior were sent in to investigate and document tribal incursions into "protected" forest areas.
In both these campaigns the Hmong, numerically the most significant of the upper-altitude dwelling minority communities, faired particularly badly (For details see Tapp, Nicholas. Sovereignty and Rebellion: The White Hmong of Northern Thailand. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1989.)They seem to have been singled out as targets by the government for various reasons, among them the fact that they were relatively recent arrivals on the Thai side of the border, although the same could be said of the Lahu and Akha. They were also opium cultivators, a practice which was falling into increasing disfavor throughout this period. Finally, they were seen to be residing in especially ecologically and/or politically sensitive spaces (the two seemed to coincide with remarkable frequency), a trait which again was shared by other groups, but which gained the Hmong particular notoriety (See Pinkaew Laungaramsri. "Ethnicity and the Politics of Ethnic Classification in Thailand ", in Ethnicity in Asia, edited by Colin Mackerras. New York : Routledge-Curzon, 2003)
As tensions grew between the Hmong and the military, the situation erupted into violence, the so-called Red Hmong Rebellion, which was only quelled when the king ordered the army to show restraint.But again, the hostilities between the Hmong and the Thai military, referred to as the Red Hmong Revolt, appeared to have less to do with anti-state or communist sympathies than with resentment at the state's intrusion on the Hmong opium trade. Nevertheless, in the wake of this confrontation, the authorities resolved to undertake a programme of forcible resettlement in which hundreds if not thousands of Hmong families were moved from their upland villages to agriculturally marginal but strategically less sensitive settlements at lower altitudes (Tapp 1989).
With the cessation of aggressions in former Indochina, the Thai Government backed down from its policy of military engagement with the peoples of the uplands, but the thawing of relations between the state and its most peripheral subjects - in most cases, not citizens - was slow in coming. One of the main hurdles to better relations proved to be a new joint initiative between the Thais and Americans, focusing on drug eradication. Opium cultivation was a practice with deep historical roots in the upland regions of Southeast Asia and had long been tolerated by both the traditional monarchies and the colonial administrations. To say that the colonial states "tolerated" opium is, in fact, an understatement. To say that the colonial states "tolerated" opium is,to say the least, an understatement.For many years, most of the colonial administrations maintained a lucrative monopoly over the sale of opium in their respective domains, as did the Thai state
However, with the fall of colonialism and more so, the return of opiate-addicted soldiers from the conflict in Vietnam, the world community's view of the opium trade underwent a sea-change, and the Thai Government responded to international opprobrium by outlawing the sale of opium, an action taken on paper in 1959 but only gaining force on the ground from the early 1970s. Once again the residents of the uplands, and in particular the Hmong, were cast as obstacles to the state's advancement, but in this instance, the corrective took a subtly different form. Rather than simply disciplining the offenders or prosecuting them, the state began a highlands development campaign designed to wean the hill tribes from their "environmentally and socially destructive" practices of swidden culture and opium cultivation through the introduction of improved agriculture and substitute crops. From the perspective of those in the uplands, this new campaign differed little from those which had preceded it. In both cases their livelihood strategies were disrupted and their communities subjected to unwanted and intrusive interventions by the state. At a rhetorical and conceptual level, however, this new campaign was different from earlier efforts in that it implicitly recognized the state's obligation for the welfare of the people in the uplands, who were now being referred to with increasing frequency as "ethnic minorities" rather than "hill tribes". However certain "hill tribe" groups, most pointedly the Karen and Lawa were excluded from the military's containment efforts during this period, because of their more sedentary settlement and cultivation practices which rendered them "civilized" in the eyes of the Thai state.
The rhetoric of "development" and hence inclusion, of minority groups, has in recent years, come to be the dominant discourse of engagement between the Thai state and its most peripheral inhabitants, though in the case of the upland minorities, this embrace has stopped well short of full acceptance. Indeed, full citizenship, the ultimate currency of inclusion in modern society, has consistently been denied to the vast majority of the minority residents of the Thai uplands - this despite numerous campaigns which were ostensibly aimed at facilitating their attainment of this status,16 State interventions have also fallen short in their efforts to create or even approximate conditions under which highland residents could enjoy an economically viable existence while remaining intact in their communities. Instead, the government's development strategy for its upland minorities has been, and continues to be, to give them the means and incentives to move out of the hills and into the lowland society where they can integrate with the larger nation. The primary (some might argue, only) real brake on this effort has been the immense revenue boon which the government - and the economy more broadly - has realized through the growth of ecotourism and trekking, an industry dependent on the preservation of at least a fragmentary remnant of the minority communities with their distinctive customs and tribal garb. These most innocuous expressions of ethnic difference are thus tolerated or even encouraged in the state's interactions with upland minorities, while more "problematic" practices like shifting cultivation, an established land use pattern in non-irrigable areas, are being phased out. It is thus unclear what the ultimate endpoint of Thailand 's state-building project will be for the people most removed from the political. centre, both geographically and culturally. The fact that this is still an ongoing project is in fact evident by the active debate which has recently surrounded discussions of citizenship for Thailand 's upland residents. Significantly, these discussions are no longer confined to the highland communities themselves nor to the government agencies assigned responsibility for "Hill Tribe Affairs". They have made their way into Thai mainstream and have been taken up by political activists who see the welfare of the people in the hills as irrevocably tied to that of politically marginal groups throughout the kingdom. the highland development efforts of this period were motivated primarily by a desire to ensure the well-being of the upland minorities. It was clearly a concern for the indirect effects of opium production and upland forestry practices on lowland residents that spurred the government's actions. But, it is significant that the avenue selected for achieving these goals was one that tacitly acknowledged the social and economic needs of upland populations, as well. Successive waves of registration and documentation efforts have created a patchwork legal framework in which persons of minority origin (indeed, even members of the same community or family) might be arbitrarily assigned any of more than a dozen legal statuses, many of which abridge their rights.